The Shadowed Country: Claude McKay and the Romance of the Victorians 9780813549729

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The Shadowed Country

The Shadowed Country



Claude McKay and the Romance of the Victorians

Jo sh Go sciak

Rutg e r s U n ive r s i ty P re s s New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gosciak, Josh. The shadowed country : Claude McKay and the romance of the Victorians / Josh Gosciak. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–8135–3731–3 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978–0–8135–3732–0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. McKay, Claude, 1890–1948—Criticism and interpretation. 2. American literature—English influences. 3. Jamaican Americans—Intellectual life. 4. Romanticism—Great Britain. 5. Jamaica—In literature. 6. Africa—In literature. I. Title. PS3525.A24785Z684 2006 811'.52—dc22 2005011642 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2006 by Josh Gosciak All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to my daughter, Jenna

C onte nt s

Acknowledgments

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1

A Poet in the Country

3

2

The Muddle of Empire

23

3

For the Love of “de Red Seam”

46

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A Garden for All Reasons

72

5

The Voyage In

99

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Crossing the Shadow-Line

124

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Postscript: 1848–1919

139

Notes Bibliography Index

143 189 199

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Acknowle dgm e nts

Thanks are due to Leslie Mitchner, the editor-in-chief at Rutgers University Press, and Brent Hayes Edwards, who reviewed the manuscript and made important suggestions for revision. I would also like to acknowledge those who helped in the transition of this scholarship from dissertation to book, as it moved from critical edition, to study, and finally to broad cultural analysis. (Much of the impetus for that movement was the result of the excellent assemblage of the Complete Poems of Claude McKay, edited by William Maxwell and published by the University of Illinois Press in 2004, though I refer to all the unpublished poems in archival form.) Jane Marcus was an untiring advocate in aligning the priorities of this work and suggested crucial linkages to England, Europe, North Africa, and Jamaica. She has, remarkably, been there all along. Peter Hitchcock probably understands the workings of Stuart Hall and Edouard Glissant better than anyone writing today and refracts that understanding through his own working-class experiences in England. He also saw the broad strokes and color where none seemed apparent. Adrienne Munich, a remarkable scholar, accessible, open, and truly concerned about literature and its place in the world, is the author of groundbreaking studies on Queen Victoria, and her help in working out some of the connections to McKay has been invaluable. I also want to thank John Lowney, whose work on Claude McKay broadened the discourse a few years ago, for looking over parts of the manuscript, and Robert Reid-Pharr, for the caution he conveyed in my first voyages out into the realm of diaspora. Katharine Greider and James L. De Jongh offered helpful suggestions at the very beginning and end of the project. McKay attracted a loyal group of enthusiasts who believed in his vision of poetics and justice, and this terrain has been admirably staked out by the hard work and persistence of Addison Gayle,Wayne F. Cooper,Tyrone Tillery, James Giles, Rhonda Cobham, Kathryne Lindberg, and Gary Holcomb, among many others. I thank the following collections and libraries for making this work possible: the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collection, the Mills Memorial Library at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; the Claude McKay Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript ix

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Acknowledgements

Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; the William Aspenwall Bradley Archive, the Nancy Cunard Collection, and the Charles Henri Ford Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin; Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York City; and the libraries at the City College of New York, West Chester University of Pennsylvania, the New York Botanical Garden, the Research Library at the New York Public Library, and the Tamiment Library of New York University. Permission to quote from Claude McKay’s unpublished letters and articles is provided courtesy of the Literary Representative for the Works of Claude McKay, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, and the Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. I especially thank Diana Lachatanere, curator of the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Anthony R.A. Hobson, the estate of Nancy Cunard, and Mrs.T. Richards, for the estate of Sydney Olivier, for permission to reprint.

The Shadowed Country

It is not this or that tangible steel or brass machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny which oppresses the lives of us all. —William Morris (1834–1896)

C hap te r 1

A Poet in the Country I was never happy in Harlem, but I was always excited, restless, and enjoyed the excitement. —Claude McKay

This work looks at the amazing times in the life of the poet Claude McKay, one of the important voices to come out of the Harlem Renaissance. I refract that voice, however, through some of the dominant discourses in the late Victorian and early modern periods, such as internationalism, pacifism, the Arts and Crafts movement, decadence, Fabian socialism, and sexual rebellion, to reach an interpretation of McKay as a modern English poet. The life of this author begins in the serene Jamaican hillside, where he grew up reading Shakespeare, Dickens, and mid-nineteenth-century popular romances and science books while apprenticing as a wheelwright and devoting time to his family’s farm near the city of Kingston. It is in Jamaica that the poet met English expatriate and garden enthusiast Walter Jekyll and encountered Sydney Olivier, the governor of Jamaica from 1907 until 1913, whose brand of Fabian socialism, transplanted to the colonies, made a profound impression on the ambitions of the young writer. McKay published his first poem in 1909,“Hard Times,” a critique of the social and economic conditions in Jamaica under an earlier harsh regime. He continued to write and eventually published two volumes of poetry in 1912, Songs of Jamaica, about peasant folkways, and Constab Ballads.Throughout his life he viewed himself as “primitive, restless, impatient, with a flair for beautiful things that I love to see as rare flowers among weeds.”1 And he, in his way, became a strange bloom among modernity’s outcrops. But poetry was not McKay’s route out of Jamaica and into Harlem. He was expected to follow in the family’s tradition of farming, banana cultivation, and was shipped off on a United Fruit Company freighter to the States, where he attended Tuskegee Institute. He found the all-black school’s racial manners, however, too restricting. He tried a semester or two at Kansas State College, where he continued his studies in agriculture, but in 1914 decided on New 3

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York City and a career in poetry. After a short time in New York, he became restless, moving on to London and brief English literary fame, then back to Harlem, and finally, in 1922, to Russia, Europe, and Morocco as a rogue internationalist. His evocative verse “Harlem Dancer” inaugurated the Jazz Age and the exodus uptown; he debuted under the female pseudonym Eli Edwards in Seven Arts, a journal associated with pacifist Randolph Bourne and critic Van Wyck Brooks.The poem’s crossover, in 1918, into mainstream intellectual culture was short-lived, however, interrupted by the race riots that simmered, with increasing defiance, throughout and in a new era—indeed, some might caution, a frighteningly new country.2 But it is another poem, “If We Must Die,” that will be forever connected with that brutal white-on-black time, which began in 1917 and continued into the “Red Summer” of 1919. The piece appeared in the July issue of the Liberator and reappeared a few months later as the Messenger’s lead editorial in its September “Riot” issue, a call-toarms for black resistance. And it established McKay as a powerful voice of an emerging black aesthetic. The initial problem, as Raymond Williams cautions us in The Country and the City, is one of perspective, how one sees “the country” and, conversely, “the city” across class and cultures in transition. When the facts that document these changes are poems, written in the familiar lexicon of a pastoral to evoke home and hearth,Williams reminds us, they are of a different sort. In describing the historical tensions that existed between country and city,Williams offers us a provocative metaphor for the colonial condition, as it, too, moves across classes, cultures—and empires.At the terminus of this movement, in the early twentieth century, it hardly mattered whether one resided near an idyllic Welsh weir, the harsh outback of Basutoland, or a boardinghouse in Harlem. “What is important in this modern literature of the colonial peoples,”Williams writes,“is that we see the history happening, see it being made, from the base of an England which, within our own literature, has been so differently described.”3 Williams likens this perspective of the country and literary history to an escalator ride that becomes ever widening and inclusive, moving laterally across geography but also historically, slicing and snipping at time lines. Just as you are convinced of the look and texture of the greenery, the escalator shifts perspective and chugs along to the Romantic era or deeper into the Renaissance. Clearly something more than just ordinary arithmetic is at work here, and something more, evidently, than ordinary history. It’s not simply getting the historical record correct: We all seem to understand that. “What we have to inquire into,”Williams concludes,“is not, in these cases, historical error, but historical perspective.”4

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To become immersed in the working out of this perspective, to elongate it and situate it in the modern colonial condition, where Williams clearly understood it to reside, is to be vaulted suddenly into a new era, what I call the shadowed country of diaspora. It is hardly ironic or shocking that this sensibility emerges, defines itself, claims territory and ground, around the time that Joseph Conrad and others had become mesmerized by the utter void of the terrain—a “white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over.”5 But at a crucial moment in the late nineteenth century in England—was it during the insistent rallies for a Land Reform Union in 1880, the failed Dockworkers’ Strike in 1889, or the quagmire in South Africa, beginning in 1891?—things fell into a jumble.6 The idyllic pastoral, juxtaposed against a monolithic and mighty metropolis of the twentieth century, a powerful icon of progress and culture, paternity and birthright, cascaded and undulated, rippling down through that idyllic countryside and out into the serpentine wastewaters of empire. Indeed, the very air seemed disturbed, remarked William Butler Yeats, by the tremors of a thin veil before the temple of god and humanity, as an entire age descended into a frenzied morass “to bring forth a sacred book.”7 But there also arose a new spirit and poetics, written in a new language, which to some, particularly the vanquished and colonized, was like the scent of a flower carried to “the remotest dwelling of mankind,” convincing all of “the green life of earth.”8 (Only many, many years later, wrought out of real blood, struggle, and independence, would a more powerful political folk sense emerge.)9 And so our imaginary escalator chugs along and across, back into time, to the very idea of the pastoral, and finally out into that heartthrob of darkness that tempted the more adventurous in the late Victorian era. THE SHADOWED COUNTRY: Claude McKay and the Romance of the Victorians, whose title is taken from a chapter in Raymond Williams’s study of the English pastoral, covers a unique historiography of the colonial condition from the perspective of the Jamaican poet Claude McKay. Like Williams, I read the country and the city as powerful metaphors, worked out in verse and imagery, on which English and colonial identity, hybridity, and “modern” aesthetics are encoded. It is about the problem of perspective, or lack of it, and how that problem rights itself, reclaims—and in ingenious ways continues—the pastoral. It also engages industrial England and late Victorians—especially those who were convinced of the virtues of Western progress. In more subtle and transparent ways, this pastoral also challenged another divide, the racial one, which had been articulated historically as a culture-hardened line of identity and cohesion, resistance and expression, by W.E.B. Du Bois and others. But there was a timidity to this pastoral, which the poet William Butler Yeats likened to a reverence for form and impulse, spoken in a muted voice as if its words would offend “readers in some

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ancient library.”10 Yes, there was something vastly mannered—yet inveterately subversive—about that pastoral, a field rich in metaphor and simplicity but ripe for encounter and renewal.11And it is here that the subtlety of McKay’s lyrics emerge. Ultimately, to see a living, breathing poet such as McKay on the cusp of a unique encounter with this country, one mustn’t focus on Harlem—or even the twentieth century. So I’ll begin with the singularly refined image of a beleaguered and quixotic Victorian who resembled in temperament the vanquished rustic of our idyllic country of the nineteenth century, embattled by a fiendishly impersonal and ideologically bent Mechanical Age. I’ll stretch that image, just as Williams suggests in moving along his panoptical escalator from the postcolonial to the pastoral, to contour a less familiar shape, at least for that era, wrought out of hybridity, diaspora, and the sensibilities of a commonwealth literature.This figure is cosmopolitan and incurably romantic, disdainful of the commercial and popular. To be a late Victorian, it seems, one must reside temperamentally always at the brink of crisis and annihilation.12 Oscar Wilde typifies the fatalistic posture and high romantic gloss of the age, one that was “spiritual and stoical, but never vulgar.” But he embodied its contradictions, elisions, and revolutions as well. His tight-fitting, high-buttoned attire belied the seething rude-boy dandy beneath the surface, who relished, as Baudelaire said, “the pleasure of astonishing and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished.”13 Beyond the rigid formalism of this Victorian attitude parodied by Wilde, one soon sees a common longing across geography, spoken in the melodic knell of the rustic. Suddenly, we visualize the countryside, the Victorian manor and metropolis, from the vantage of these colonial movements and ruptures of the twentieth century. In this queer jumble of the pastoral and Victorian, the urban and idyllic, McKay found the elixir to his “weary searchin’ heart.” It was a longing, he wrote as a young poet in Jamaica,“in me dept’s of heart dat I can conquer not.” ’Tis a wish dat I’ve been havin’ from since I could form a t’o’t, ’Tis to sail athwart the ocean an’ to hear de billows roar, When dem ride aroun’ de steamer, when dem beat on England’s shore.14 And this became elongated and stretched into a desire that enveloped an Old England, as well as a rotund, red-petticoated queen who bespoke “an imperial mission of continual conquest made by being represented as familial.”15 Jamaican peasant and landed gentry alike, it seemed, were now lulled by the same familial radiance, a soothing tableau against the rumblings of the new century.16 To McKay,“our Missis Queen,Victoria de good,” was the embodiment of “homeland,” clipped and manicured in a folksy Creole, and gussied up with all the brilliance of “deir solemn sacred beauty.” And she nodded approvingly,

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from every corner and crevice, every office building wall and public school hallway—forever looking out, searching.17 This stern image with veil and scepter in hand, the poet admitted later, “appeared to us as an imposing white mother, more important to Heaven and Earth and God than the Virgin Mary.”18 It is not surprising at all, then, to discover that McKay also wore the ornaments of empire—“de red seam” of a fastidious though too poetic constable in the service of his country.19But this feeling of familial connection also permitted a certain license to enact his own romantic wanderlust: to encounter, in a grand poetic way, the “immortal Milton an’ de wul-famous Shakespeare, Past’ral Wordswort’, gentle Gray.”20 Hadn’t Rupert Brooke, who chronicled similar ground during World War I, also quested after a regal image that promised fame as well as renewal? “A body of England’s, breathing English air, / Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.” If one simply breathed in “a dust, whom England bore, shaped, made aware,” one could relax, Brooke believed, at “peace, under an English heaven.”21 And he truly believed this, as a child of this new country. In contrast to other Harlem Renaissance writers, McKay’s training in the pastoral emerges with his mastery of popular horticulture, which came of age in the new century along with modern warfare and shifting colonial terrain. And this interest in a larger commonwealth garden, so to speak, was one of the cultural routes into English society for this Jamaican poet.22 McKay’s verse, in fact, does more, and describes the ecological changes that had brought about a crisis in late Victorian culture that was accelerating through the world and in the countryside—a result, in the colonies, of deforestation and soil depletion, unchecked conglomeration and devaluation.23 Here among the genteel garden set, incongruously, were sympathetic readers motivated by a genuine desire to nurture and “repair”; to mend and strengthen by grafting and hybridizing; to add color and balance by restoring locale.24 Gertrude Jekyll, the renowned Victorian gardener famous for her antiformalist statements, explained: “In the hands of the hybridist, distinct and beautiful flowers and improved forms of fruits and vegetables are moulded, and our gardens made to yield a more beautiful produce.”25 Such desires for harmony played directly upon McKay’s artistry and on his unique relationship to England, and to the world. With one sure foot upon his father’s fire-burnt soil on that serene hillside, McKay reached out to the English across a vast divide, as that fearless eighteenth-century trans-Atlantic navigator Olaudah Equiano had done many years before.26 McKay would return, he boasted in a rhyme he composed in 1920, in the manner of a well-rounded cosmopolitan—a forwardthinking, sexually liberal, and politically tolerant Victorian. Here, in the confluence of country and city, was a glimpse of that powerful face and soul which was simply called “the Metropolis,” the embodiment of Old England and contemporary London—a realm “we were taught as kids to call the

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Motherland.” It is this vast idyllic part of his life that “I always wanted to know.”27 But you will never find, All the familiar things of me intact, I am like a classic that a modern mind Has cut and altered to improve the act.28 The poet would stand on his own, he explained, like a well-groomed Caliban, with a satchel full of annancy tricks in one hand, “richer now by many things.” He’d offer “such treasures as I found along the way,” the stuff of “a modern mind,” to a world that had been inexorably “cut and altered.”29 He’d rework the pastoral on an international scale to suit his colonial temperament, a view he expressed in the poem “I Shall Return”: This mood that seems to you so passing strange, This that you wrongly call a cynic smile, Is nothing but a sequence of sea-change— I have been running round a little while. Ironically, as “the old images of city and country seem to fall away,” Williams reminds us, and are replaced by stories of more exotic places—the “plantation worlds of Kipling and Maugham and early Orwell; the trading worlds of Conrad and Joyce Cary”—the allure of the London metropolis, that aging face of a collapsing empire, resonated ever powerfully for those in search of a new pastoral, new routes of engagement: the place to publish, the poet was convinced, if one meant to be “wul-famous.”30 Those remarkable treasures that McKay brought with him to New York and London are layered in beautifully fissured sentiments, some translucent, others mysteriously oblique and uneven, entangling with other traditions and voices “to improve the act.” Embedded in the verse are snippets of the Victorian double poem, the formalism of the sonnet, the rhythm and resilience of the ballad, and those meeting places of the old and new, the colonial and modern, that provide the inevitable “slippage” of meaning that Stuart Hall calls “the open semiosis of culture.”31 This is the conjectural place of Derrida’s différence, where fixed cultural signage is “dialogically re-appropriated.”32 In this condition of Derrida’s différence, formalized as diaspora in the late twentieth century, McKay’s poetics seem most comfortable. And what seems important here, at this fissured juncture in postcolonial history, is that one’s identity, or rather one’s cultural place, as Stuart Hall and others tell us, is no longer “a matter of ontology, of being, but becoming.”33 This shadowed realm of which McKay wrote is a similar world of transition and becoming, much like diaspora, whose semiosis as yet is unnamed and unspoken. Its folk sense is

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bracketed in hybridity and intermediacy, and not only touches Harlem but also angles out to Tangier and Marseilles, speaking of an ongoing becoming.34 It functions as a resistance, as well, to more anchored imperial histories, whether in the Caribbean or en route to Europe or America, which get relayed as “moments of cultural struggle, of revision and re-appropriation.”35 McKay’s writing does not collapse internally like the poems of Arnold or Yeats or remain within a unified plane of expression but mingles with other incipient diasporas, which then invoke more distant lands and symbols. In McKay’s jumbling of English and Jamaican, romantic and rustic, ballad and sonnet, is the cultural becoming in which those moments of hybridity, dissonance, rupture, and discontinuity combine to create a poem where “lines and colors” are “more manifold.” My senses quicken to appreciate The new landmarks arisen midst the old, The different signs and sounds that dominate.36 Any artistic expression arising out of this confluence, explains Hall, naturally works at “a different space and time frame, a different chronotope—in the time of difference.”37 And it is this dislocation that ultimately encodes modern meaning to the pastoral, a form that McKay reinvents but one that already has arisen from a history “torn between languages and identities” and “fractured through cartographies of displacement and disavowal.”38 The Haitian-born author Edwidge Danticat speaks of her writing as “maroonage,” a confined covert move against culture.39 We can view McKay’s technique along similar lines, but one that is unconfined by locale. One conceives of it broadly as a cartography of resistance or décalage, a place of cultural unevenness (ultimately better suited to the poet’s cultural project).40 Less important for McKay and other diaspora authors is the singularity, purity, or essence of any one location.41 Brent Hayes Edwards prefers to see this cultural struggle, the frequency through which McKay inscribes poetic nuance, as a diasporic register where values, institutions, and cultural expressions can be off center, demystified, and individualized; he relates it to the way the parts of the body interact.42 What does it mean, he asks, when one articulates a joint? “The connection speaks,” Edwards tells us, and is simultaneously linkage and separation.“Articulation is always a strange and ambivalent gesture, because finally, in the body, it is only difference—the separation between bones or members—that allows movement.”Within these gaps, however, is a resistance that has its own chronotope and time sense, neither advancing nor reversing; it is, Edwards explains, “the kernel of precisely that which cannot be transferred or exchanged, the received biases that refuse to pass over when one crosses the water.”43 McKay’s verse as articulation, then, as it separates and connects, conveniently steps around and moves against a larger nation culture, linking up yet

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also reappropriating. It too refuses to bend in the crossing, and it becomes inherently revolutionary and subversive as a result. It works to loosen historical linkages between culture and place, Hall reminds us, and is “de-territorializing in its effects.”Within this décalage of aesthetic struggle is the unfolding, where one’s identity—for the Caribbean, the colonial, the expatriate—“in any fixed form, lies ahead of us.” It is no longer a question of what tradition makes of us, Hall explains of these transformations, as much as what we make of tradition.44 Here is where the real work of culture begins, is reinvented, and slides along a spectrum, much like Williams’s escalator, without end or beginning. Out of the vibrant body comes a song, Uncovered like a jewel from the earth, Out of uncharted realm of shadows and light, Is flashed the tidings of another birth.45 It is this resistance that makes McKay such an elusive and intriguing poet, even today. In fact, what is so amazing about this poetic style is the way it smoothly exemplifies the linkages between culture, location, and identity theorized by Stuart Hall, Brent Hayes Edwards, Kim Butler, Mary Louise Pratt, and other scholars of diaspora.46 It exists unnamed in poetic imagination.47 McKay avoids the sharp lines of color and continent so harshly pressed in Harlem, preferring the romantic arabesques of movement and exile. His poetry is infused with a “universal wind” reminiscent of Percy Shelley’s rebellious nature, which rattles and pricks at those “old foundations” as he works along different frequencies “from sill to rafter,” heaven to earth.48 Appropriating a term such as diaspora that has been fixed within a historical moment, as Edwards and Hall suggest, allows us a recognizable entryway into this other perspective, one that is more relational and refined.We are no longer in a teleological or redemptive mode that circles back, Hall explains, “to the restoration of its originary moment, healing all rupture, repairing every violent breach through this return.”49 One’s view now unfolds majestically, is lateral and ahistorical and composed of as-yet-unnamed migrations, some fixed but others more incidental or imaginary.This is how I see McKay’s trajectory into traditional English form. One might now include the pastoral, late Victorian aesthetics, and even insurgent movements such as internationalism within this robust field of vision. In the summer of 1914, Harlem had not yet earned its reputation as the black culture capital when Claude McKay gleaned its urban landscape.50 While it had little of the youthful, jazzy attraction that would make it the popular place it became in the 1920s, Harlem was central to the poet’s vision of a diaspora, which would be used conveniently as ironic backdrop or foil for broader explorations of migrations and collisions of cultures. “It was as if my boyhood’s

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seminude backwoods life, or the jungle if you will, was all dressed and parading itself gaily in the biggest city in the world,” he explained.51 McKay’s first contacts in New York City, however, were with the intellectuals associated with the Lost Generation who published Seven Arts, a bohemian Greenwich Village magazine, the Irishman Frank Harris’s Pearson’s magazine, and Crystal and Max Eastman’s Liberator.52 Previous to that move, McKay had lived in Alabama (where he briefly attended Tuskegee Institute), Kansas, New Hampshire, and Kingston, Jamaica.53 McKay’s “Harlem Dancer,” which follows, is one of the first poems, to my knowledge, to interrogate Harlem as a geographic site of cultural performance and oppression:54 Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway; Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes Blown by black players upon a picnic day. She sang and danced on gracefully and calm, The light gauze hanging loose from her form; To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm Grown lovelier for passing through a storm. Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curls Luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise, The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys and even the girls, Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze; But looking at her falsely-smiling face, I knew her self was not in that strange place. This Harlem is alien and supranatural, a place of resistance and confined acts in which creative energy has been tempered and controlled. But this idea of Harlem as a questionable site of identity, coincidentally, is one shared with Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose early depiction of “the life of the race as a unit, swayed by currents of existence of which it was and was not a part,” maps the psychology of this early folk-urban collision.55 Both Dunbar and McKay show an uneasiness over early twentieth-century cosmopolitanism, even as they celebrate in their various articulations a folk aesthetics from that other country. While McKay perceived Harlem as questionable in terms of cultural fulfillment, Alain Locke saw a new consciousness unfolding with the migration northward. Locke’s interest in folk aesthetics parallels the mass migrations from the countryside into the city that were taking place in England, the United States, and Jamaica. It was a moment of suspenseful change, and Locke imbued his Harlem with imagination, urgency, and glitzy optimism, a centerpiece of international charm. Harlem was transcendental and transnational, the dynamic agency not just for a New Negro consciousness but for a global

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reordering; it reflected a nascent diasporic yearning that was part of, yet separate from, the pulsing urbanity of New York City that encircled it. By 1925, there was intense cultural activity in Harlem, which was highlighted for the sophisticated worldly readers of the Survey Graphic in a special issue titled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro.” Harlem was soon on its way toward an “imaginary” topo, a place of transnational exchange that would buttress modern nationalist tendencies, and was celebrated by Frank Harris,Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks, and other writers for precisely that reason. Locke noted presciently: Here in Manhattan is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. It has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer, worker, preacher, and criminal, exploiter and social outcast.56 The secret to all of this, Locke intimated,“lies close to what distinguishes Harlem from the ghettos with which it is sometimes compared. The ghetto picture is that of a slowly dissolving mass, bound by ties of custom and culture and association, in the midst of a freer and more varied society.” This fluid, transnational image would be an essential anchor for many of its writers, Claude McKay included, who nevertheless sought creative solitude elsewhere: Harlem was simply one of a number of points along an antimodernist trajectory. Even its moment of conception as a cultural capital—in contrast to its characterization as a “dissolving mass”—occurred elsewhere, in Paris or Berlin, where Locke met with writers, editors, and artists. Harlem, then, took on imaginative dimensions beyond national boundaries.As Locke observed:“Harlem I grant you isn’t typical—but it is significant, it is prophetic.” But of what? That question remained unanswered in the rush for the new. Much capital was invested, and Harlem soon loomed large as an imaginary realm, teetering between diaspora and an insurgent internationalism, even as its proponents migrated in and out of Harlem, as well as Paris, London, and Spain.57 As the New Negro and its renaissance began to embody a sanitized racial unity, Harlem continued along a more transnational route, at least demographically. It mirrored other “modernist” migratory points (such as Paris, London, Berlin), yet did indeed work at a different frequency, much like the other “Harlems” around the world, whether in Marseilles (such as “The Ditch” that McKay first chronicled in Banjo) or Tangier. In the United States and England, and throughout the commonwealth, there was a curious convergence of traditions at work, helped along by internationalists such as

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McKay: abolition and feminism, Fabian reform politics, folk vernacular, and cosmopolitanism, all moving uncomfortably together in Harlem’s new “exotic” geography. As McKay would later note, some writers resisted trading in their “black problem” for a more intellectual “white problem.” Real Harlem representation—whether by whites or blacks—was untenable, most agreed, regardless of Du Bois’s characterization of Harlem as “conservative and as conventional as ordinary working folk everywhere.”58 Over time, like that nimble cabaret dancer of McKay’s verse, Harlem’s spirit would bend to the wills at play around it—filtered through the Crisis, New Negro, Opportunity, Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, and other influences. Harlem itself would become a manufactured fiction—and this is where Alain Locke’s New American Negro entered contested terrain, I believe, for McKay and others. Internationalism and pacifism, as conceived and tempered in the early twentieth century, provided the necessary intellectual space between modern ideologies and cultural utopias such as Harlem that was so essential to a writer like McKay, who was in between traditions and prosody, at least aesthetically. But as historian Sandi Cooper points out:“Nothing is or was easy about early usages of internationalism.”59 In our attempts to understand the new poetics and the zeitgeist of the new century, we need to conceptualize internationalism in the same lexicon as Hall’s accentuated value. It, too, is a point of appropriation and then revaluation in a rather long discursive history of resistance. One can visualize that political opening in the language of Senghor’s décalage, that place of racial and colonial unevenness where borders overlap and intersect. As early as the eighteenth century, this contentious landscape was of concern to internationalists. But it had reached a crisis with the onset of World War I, its folkways severely dislocated and in exile as boundaries were further erased, consumed, and devalued in what has become known as a mad scramble for Africa. Those radicals who espoused internationalism followed a wide trajectory across time and class. Sydney Olivier,William Morris, Henry George, Gertrude and Walter Jekyll, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Crystal Eastman, C. K. Ogden, and Claude McKay all engaged the machinery of progress and prosperity that brought war and empires, and they all saw in the revaluation of land a way out of an impasse. By merely shifting perspective, these reformers believed, one could demilitarize language, improve social relations, loosen national boundaries, invigorate a new poetics, and restore some sense to a process of colonization that was horribly out of kilter.60 The international way was a holistic approach, first proposed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham as a check on the reckless amassing of land, wealth, and cultures by enlightened democracies of the eighteenth century.The internationalist approach was used by abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Ida B.Wells-Barnett to advocate for civil rights in the late nineteenth century, and again in the twentieth

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by Owen Chandler, the editor of the Messenger.61 In England, internationalism impacted the work of John Stuart Mill,William Morris, and later, Cambridge intellectuals such as C. K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, who organized against the war and advocated for women’s rights.62 For McKay as a sexual rebel, internationalism crosses over into the twentieth century not as ideology, but as a vast social network of pacifists and feminists, renegades and vagabonds, quirky intellectuals and assorted political rogues, and spills out disruptively onto the modern dance floors of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cardiff, Liverpool, Marseilles, and Tangier. It is the terminus for McKay’s peculiar diasporic self-awareness, which unfolds beautifully, beyond any fixed geography. Metaphorically, this dance floor is a lyrical crescendo to the poet’s deeply impassioned love affair with the Victorians, the country, and the pastoral. What better image to represent the indeterminacy of Hall’s location or that theoretical struggle that attempts to explain reappropriation and renewal? It is practical social medicine, as well, and provides its own balm and rhythm, as one moves around and within, giving expression, linking up, articulating.63 It is a meeting place for émigrés and exiles and those newly arrived from the country, where uptown commingles with downtown in a new becoming and zeitgeist.64 The dance floor, in the modern postcolonial imagination, is the tropical limit to Edouard Glissant’s poetics of movement, and an elusive point along Hitchcock’s cartography. Its abilities to incite seemed legendary and were revealed to McKay at a Liberator party in the summer of 1922, when sexual innuendo and not politics instigated a confrontation with police when he embraced the international feminist and pacifist Crystal Eastman, a white woman and dear friend, on the dance floor.The New York papers fed the race frenzy and made a scandal of it, he remarked later.65 This was just one moment in many encounters with this contact zone, revealing unspoken taboos and resistances, ending in elision or rupture.Those aesthetic meeting places, like the dance floor, have their locations in our culture and literary imaginations. But it is no longer an easy task to map their origins, Hall reminds us, or even what sensibilities have been made of them.66 I must not see upon your face Love’s softly glowing spark; For there’s the barrier of race, You’re fair and I am dark.67 Within this lyrical arabesque lies McKay’s “desire for a perfect unity of movement.”68 Such harmony would work through the poems as trope or conceit. It was not the animal rhythms but the intellectual engagement that excited McKay, and around him, in this physical encounter, unfolded more exotic

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blooms, breeds, and border crossings, a richly textured, multivalent world, tradition bound yet wildly transgressive. “You ask where I live,” he remarked to Harold Jackman, a young Harlem artist and protégé. “No place in particular. I live all over Harlem, often sleeping in accidental beds.Where I am supposed to stay does not matter and won’t be of any use to you because I am rarely there.”69 In Harlem one perceives a shadow of that poetry and a modern dance floor that is made of bits or shards from a deeper archaeological vein. That shadow continually shifts, gliding from one partner or host to the next, one arm and culture to another. Good dance, like music, the poet mused to Jackman, should always get you into this ecstasy.“If you have never been intoxicated by music, I feel sorry for you.” It was, he remarked, a feeling akin to the religious.70 But McKay’s faith, it seemed for a very long time, was unlike any we knew. Obviously, McKay’s broad diasporic aesthetics—broad in the way it transcends the racial tenor of the age—did not elide with Alain Locke’s smoothtalking dialectic on blackness and utility, revolution and conformity, accommodation and resistance in the United States. Yet for a long time, McKay’s verse continued to be interpreted through the prism of the New Negro, which had little to do with his poetic ambitions. Possibly our own chauvinisms blur our objectivity and sense of individual integrity. But there is historical and racial resistance at work here as well.That this attitude has endured for well over half a century alerts us to the tendencies of scholars and ideologues, especially in the cold war era, obsessed with the fictions and facts of the color line. Harlem, nurtured to perfection by Alain Locke, its leading alchemist, staggered under the weight of a U.S. ideology of race that was just too refined in the celebrated melting pot of struggle and adversity. Locke’s New Negro, mended with bandages and tape, endured through the entire twentieth century, shamelessly pulled out of Booker T.Washington’s exhausted syntax of fear and accommodation, detailed in his 1900 book, New Negro for a New Century.71 “No sane observer,” Locke offered up as explanation for the New Negro in 1925, “however sympathetic to the new trend, would contend that the great masses are articulate as yet.”And his attitude hadn’t moved a progressive inch after ten years of proselytizing:“Fundamentally, for the present,” he summed up again, in 1936,“the Negro is radical only on race matters, in other words, a forced radical, a social protestant rather than a genuine radical.” As the critic Van Wyck Brooks remarked in 1916: “Old American things are old as nothing else anywhere in the world is old, old without majesty, old without mellowness, old without pathos, just shabby and bloodless and worn out.” Such was Locke’s vision for the new, which seemed to wind round and round, getting nowhere.72

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One of McKay’s U.S. biographers, Tyrone Tillery, tells us that the problem with Harlem Renaissance authors such as McKay was one of definition and role modeling.73 How was the New Negro to be perceived beyond Locke’s rarified boundaries? As radical and savior, or alchemist and magician? The era hardly lacked polished antidotes to this problem, and each attempted to reinvent itself with every crisis or riot, from Locke’s New Negro manifesto, W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Criteria of Negro Art,” and Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Art and the Racial Mountain” to cruder variations rattled off in the newspapers, theater, and cinema of the era. To everyone’s mind, indeed, Harlem was the “race capital,” as Locke boasted, a place where identities were bent and mangled, molded and contoured. And therein lies part the problem of the twentieth century, succinctly summed up by W.E.B. Du Bois:“All Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.”74 Attempts at talking up Harlem, which McKay likened to a wondrous, lush tropics “quickened to the beat of New York’s double-marching time,” seemed just too damned studied for his tastes.75 Yet to the progressive world that promoted race relations as if they were the solution to democracy itself, McKay was perceived as a threat.76 He had never really been good at testifying, he admitted, and so seemed at times, in his white-on-black encounters, too aloof, self-assured, and aristocratic, the signature of that hated ugly American.77 Incomprehensibly, his good friend and mentor Max Eastman helped turn the wheel and compared him to King Christopher of Haiti, remarking how the poet’s “eyebrows arched high up and never came down.”78 He admired McKay’s “good brains” and charm but found his disposition unpredictably alarming. “Perhaps we should have kept him as a cook or as a maid.”79 George Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, thought McKay would stand a bit taller in the cultured arenas of London as a colonieshardened pugilist. (McKay consorted with boxers and relied on his fists on several occasions while in England, though not necessarily in defense of poetry.) “Poets remain poor,” Shaw philosophized, “unless they have an empire to glorify and popularize them, like Kipling.”80 But U.S. radicals, hardliners such as John Rorty and Mike Gold, were less amused. McKay was denounced outright in print, which was the preferred tactic, for retiring to “the sidewalk cafes of Montmartre” instead of to Harlem, which by the 1930s had become a faded ghetto that even Locke’s alchemy could not remedy.81 But McKay had learned his brand of politicking the Fabian way, in the countryside of Jamaica and the East End of London, which was to convince and discourse, not proselytize or denounce. People in the United States, he pointed out irritably, just didn’t get it. They are always “spouting, Democracy, Democracy.” It is what you make it, he remarked sternly, “not what you say it is.”82 He likened his “progressive step” to his desire for perfect harmony on the dance floor:“Keep

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in the middle of the road / Though the road be deep and wide / There’s a ditch on either side.”83 In 1950, Cedric Dover, an East Indian poet who, like McKay, was educated in London, approached the famous race leader and editor of the Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois, about lending his weight and authority to a new project to bring a delinquent McKay into “our fold.”84 McKay had been dead for two years, but that hardly mattered. The project was about salvaging a reputation and a canon in formation. This desire to recuperate McKay’s cache speaks to the subtle shifts in the political fabric, the lines of race and ideology, in the postcolonial era after World War II.85 Although that image might have become a little frayed, overly Victorian, and wearied, Dover seemed especially troubled by his friend McKay’s inexplicable conversion to Roman Catholicism, which occurred sometime in the 1940s—an inappropriate turn for the “leader of the revolt in Negro literature.”86 While Dover did not mention names, Max Eastman, did. He chastised the poet for allowing himself to be charmed by “a little ignorant-minded neurotic like Dorothy Day,” the famous organizer of the Catholic Worker, and contributor, in the early days, to the Masses.87 McKay’s career, which seemed to have stalled on his return to the United States in 1934, now bottomed out as “a tragic fact” in the anticommunist furor of the postwar years.88 Catholics and Communists, Jews and Bolshevists, it seemed, were all victims of what McKay called “the Terror.” In obsessing on the poet’s “historical record,” Eastman pressed his own twisted political agenda.89 In an introduction to the selected poems, he harshly trivialized McKay’s importance at the Third International Conference in Moscow in 1922, where McKay was the guest of honor. Eastman played up stock images of the sentimentalized darky that seemed horribly old in the way described by Van Wyck Brooks—and completely wrong.All the negative imaging, couched in U.S. jingoism, worked at lessening the poet’s hold on a pastoral tradition, which he had worked out, near the end of his life, in the temperament of Roman Catholicism.90 But only in the decade that followed did the author’s notoriety within the Harlem Renaissance become a sure thing, through the persistence of Langston Hughes.91 In 1949, when Hughes first began assembling material for The Poetry of the Negro, McKay rightly appeared in the Caribbean section, since by all accounts he was still a Jamaican and an English subject (though in 1940 he was granted U.S. citizenship). But after the appearance of McKay’s selected poems in 1953, Hughes decided to go with the “fold.” In 1965, he wrote Arna Bontemps of his decision to move McKay into “the U.S.A. group, our first section.” Inexplicably, the entire Caribbean section had disappeared.“Oh well!” Hughes apologized. “It’s my determination to get the First Book of Negroes revised!”92

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That determination seems to have instigated the cultural ripple that continues today. Later biographers, such as James Richard Giles, Wayne F. Cooper, and Tyrone Tillery, tended to grasp this angle readily as a way of contextualizing McKay, almost exclusively and unquestioning, within a Harlem setting.93 When a poet like McKay sets his lyrics amid medieval greenish fires, Spenserian faeries, and Keatsian nightingales, it is more than mere poetry, as Raymond Williams has pointed out—more than a poem in motion, perambulating from Kingston to Harlem or London to Tangier. It is of a different sort, and one that vaults us into a discourse with Europe, England, and the West:“to mix with it, transform it, to make it.”94 Thus one hears in “A Dream” the sweet tropical sound of the “wesly horn” that awakens the poet to an English romance in Jamaica, across traditions and disciplines—a longing of home and love. It is the stuff of dreams— and of poetry—encircling traditions and diasporas: Brooks, Burns, Arnold, Shelley,Wordsworth.95 I leave my home again, wandr’ing afar, But goes with me her true, her gentle heart, Ever to be my hope, my guiding star, And whisperings of comfort to impart. Methinks we’re strolling by the woodland stream, And my fame thrills with joy to hear her sing! But, O my God! ’tis all—’tis all a dream; This is the end, the rude awakening. In “A Dream,” included in 1912’s Songs of Jamaica, McKay unfolds and meshes those tensions, sometimes dissonantly, such as the Scottish rhythms of Robert Burns grafted onto images of “sleeping majoes,” “bamboo groves,” and “shiny star-apples.”96 But he departs from this rustic tradition to follow his own “winding foot path” to cool woodlands and a brooklet, where bucktoes and small crawfish play—as he skips ever so lightly past his peasant father, stooped over “fire-burnt” fields in “honest toil.” Amid the “tropic music,” he hears the joyous outburst of a solitary nightingale.97 Yet instead of rapture, the poet is suddenly, rudely, awakened, as in a Romantic lyric. It is “the end,” he cries. But of what? Is it the poet’s place in his sprawling metropolis, or is it more likely a rupture in that seductive English heaven? “Gone now those happy days,” the Jamaican laments, with all the sadness of a landlocked mariner in search of friendly seas to heal his soul,“when all was blest.” For I have left my home and kindred dear; In a strange place I am a stranger’s guest, The pains, the real in life, I’ve now to bear.

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No more again I’ll idle at my will, Running the mongoose down upon the lea; No more I’ll jostle Monty up the hill, To pick the cashews off the laden tree. I feel the sweetness of those days again, And hate, so hate, on the past scenes to look; All night in dreaming comes the awful pain, All day I groan beneath the iron yoke. In mercy then, ye Gods, deal me swift death! Ah! you refuse, and life instead you give; You keep me here and still prolong my breath, That I may suffer all the days I live. In contrast to the more reassuring images of Wordsworth or Shelley, where nature symbolizes respite, the sound of the nightingale in “A Dream” only prolongs the torment of his “rude awakening.” McKay’s lyrics, one realizes, are treacherous terrain, where each word hangs haphazardly on metaphors that then slip beyond one’s grasp into the mist of the Jamaican countryside. One moment we’ve sprinted barefoot across fire-burnt soil, the next, we’re in a peaceful wood charmed by a nightingale. In this tumble of traditions, one is forever seeking to anchor onto an image—any image—of a homeland, a sense of place that might become a living memory, as Raymond Williams conjectured, and an ideal.98 ’Tis home again, but not the home of yore; Sadly the scenes of bygone days I view, As I walk the olden paths once more, My heart grows chilly as the morning dew. McKay’s literary ambitions colorfully mimic this world in motion, and English literary traditions are diced to feed a ravenous discourse.Thus seemingly classical figures such as his “darling Idalee,” alluringly clad in white, become odd oxymorons in the designs of this hybrid author—used to fulfill a dream quest that might bring peace of mind and contentment or engender further torment.“But see!” he tells us,“to-day again my life is glad,” My heart no more is lone, nor will it pine; A comfort comes, an earthy fairy clad, In white, who guides me with her hand in mine.99 She is “faerie queene,” white mother, rotund queen, even the protesting suffragists, whose uniforms were white and appeared in front-page photos in all the commonwealth newspapers at the time.100 Everything is to be used, mixed up, redefined in this pursuit.

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As we step around this rich historiography through Harlem dance floors and English conceits, I’d like to envision McKay as a well-traveled rustic who plied his readers with a treasure cache of familiar yet strangely exotic metaphors. McKay would remain poor, in the United States and Europe, as Shaw surmised, a querulous second cousin to empire’s more well-behaved offspring. But what a wealth of imaginings he would conjure up for us! His popularity would rise with the hopes and desires of this new homeland, he was convinced, which was everywhere yet nowhere—carved lovingly from a vast shadowed country.101 And it would be his register—a diasporic register, as Brent Hayes Edwards has pointed out—as an English poet from Jamaica, his country. His step and movement within and against the discourses and traditions of the time made for a hardier variety and enabled him to meet head-on William Butler Yeats’s own uncertainties in an age of crisis and impulse. There would be other voices, too, and other engagements along the way. Throughout all these encounters, McKay would add a layer of cynicism and antithesis, with a fin-de-siècle flair, a self-styled decadent who moved in and out of the country and beyond, to Europe, Russia, Spain, North Africa.102 One can see the sweep of this synthesis, as Raymond Williams tells us, from the base of an England that is differently described: Shakespeare to Milton, William Ernest Henley to James Thomson, Matthew Arnold to Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ernest Dowson to Oscar Wilde.We hear an echo of that distant fatalism, borrowed from Dowson’s “Cynara,” in McKay’s “Sukee River,” and the familiar lull of Arnold’s “Dover Beach” is layered in the more tumultuous “Rest in Peace.” In “La Paloma in London,” the poet enacts a soulful search for “new scenes, new raptures for the fevered night” that is eerily reminiscent of Swinburne’s passions, desires, uncertainties.103 In all the poems there is this constant dialogic encounter with the country, the traditions, and the locations of meaning: Where I am supposed to stay does not matter and won’t be of any use to you. It is like the wail of that “wesly” horn the young poet encounters in “A Dream.” To get at McKay’s meaning around those elusive locations, one needs to listen to the cadence and pauses in his words, and these are found in a recording of a reading of “If We Must Die,” that legendary and elusive dirge. Like almost all McKay’s work, this recording was issued posthumously—in 1954, the year after the appearance of his Selected Poems, some six years following his death. His voice rises up, wraithlike though forlorn, as if through the mist of time and temper.The words are clipped and sharp, like that tight Edwardian fit he at times assumed, as he reminds listeners of the terror that still persists, even today, touching everyone,“black or brown yellow or white, Catholics, Protestants or pagans.”The idea for the poem arose out of a dare from Frank Harris, an influential London editor in the early twentieth century. New to America

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himself, Harris believed that black poets had their own aesthetic concerns, as well as political issues, to work out. He suggested, however, John Milton’s “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont,” written in 1671 in response to the Protestant persecutions in Europe, as a form through which McKay might find his voice.104 There is a bit of the fiery evangelical in Milton’s verse that gives it a sense of testifying, so it nicely fit the moment. Yet that style seemed too coarsely ecclesiastical for McKay, who preferred a more lyrical tone, honed of colonial accommodation and Victorian subtlety. Still, buried within the poem, one hears an echo of that Piedmont massacre. Many years later, McKay confessed to being puzzled by the popularity of “If We Must Die,” which has been cited in textbooks as a bellwether of black rage and the anguished cry of a beleaguered race. “Frankly,” the poet admitted, “I have never regarded myself as a Negro poet.” That and other lyrics were universal, he pointed out, and he hoped that, in the future, those poems would be understood as they were intended to be.105 Such a desire, especially for a black poet, was unrealistic. Today a new global order has taken shape, formed out of those very fissures of diaspora and resistance that intrigued McKay. One is actively engaged in eliminating slippage, permeability, and articulation to become more self-sacrificing and censoring. We arrive, battle hardened, to a new kind of defensive and racialized nationalism, eerily evocative of those early twentieth-century moments in which McKay lived, a time of highly secure borders and political interrogations, lies and innuendo.106 It sweeps through metropolises, rises up in the countryside, and can turn a century and humanity upside down. Ideology is powerful stuff, and was a fairly new idea in the early century, tied to the yetto-be-tested truths of propaganda in support of a shared destiny.107 But when mixed with artistic expression or race, as Du Bois recommended, it tended to become reactive and enclosed, Edward Said tells us,“antiseptically quarantined from its worldly affiliations.”108 This attitude seemed to be on the rise everywhere—in the arts, fashion, newspapers, radio—and was associated with war and nationhood.109 In fact, as the poet Geneviere Taggard suggested, it became increasingly difficult, especially after the Great War, “to put roots deep into a soil pre-empted by propagandists who insist that the artist bear only one kind of fruit.”110 McKay chose not to sentimentalize the lives of those who were lowly or down-and-out, either in or out of the country, or their dance floors. Nor was it his desire to become an unwitting dupe in his own cultural annihilation, as many had done before, “trampled and mangled, a bloody, blackened sight.”111 McKay was a unique phenomenon on America’s democratizing cultural front—a clip-talking “darky” who quoted Shakespeare instead of Scripture and boasted of his blackness as if the depth of color was an emblem of sodden

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truth.112 But we must be vigilant about condemning the poet for having “sundered,” as Eric Walrond put it,“all ties with America.”113 On the contrary, one needs to work against such thinking, especially when that advice is wrapped around deceptive friendships and alliances, as had been the author’s luck in the United States. Let us instead move to the century’s beginnings and envision the author as that much-admired “man without a country” whom Max Eastman, at a nobler time in his life, appreciated as the real thing—not as exotic, but as a visceral artist “who is able to think clearly and love truth no matter what occasions arise.”114 Even as fascism spoke the lie to world peace in the 1930s, McKay kept those core values, incredibly, intact.“About art,” he remarked stubbornly,“I’m a Romantic. I salute it everywhere.”115

C hap te r 2

The Muddle of Empire You blinded go, afraid to see the Truth, Closing your eyes to and denying Beauty; You stultify the dreams of visioned youth All in the prostituted name of Duty. —Claude McKay, “The Dominant White”

As an intellectual of the African diaspora who touched upon and reinvigorated the cultures of America, England, Europe, and the Caribbean, Claude McKay had no desire to “write about Africa in its pure state.” He was a realist, as Carl Cowl, his literary agent, later explained, who lacked “the concerns of those who believe that every loose narrative thread must be neatly tied up in the end.”1 He also did not share with other Europeans the utopian illusion about the perfect society anywhere—in the wilds or in one’s imagination. “I don’t believe that any such place exists,” McKay admitted, “since modern civilization has touched and stirred the remotest corners.” As for “Negroid Africa”—his term for the global reach of a black presence—it will produce its own poets peculiar to its soil.2 Until then, he preferred “the days of King Rum and Sugar,” he boasted, when swashbuckling dukes and viceroys gave a semblance of enlightenment, to the “second-rate civil servants and military misfits” of his day, who seemed driven more by the efficiency of the pocketbook.3 In McKay’s preference for the days of old-style aristocratic rule, one senses an arrow pointed at the heart of the plebeian Sydney Olivier, a selfstyled “British West Indian” and civil servant–governor of Jamaica, whom the poet nevertheless admired as “the most brilliant statistician of the Fabian Socialists.” Olivier, too, had no love for the imperial system, and as “outsiders,” both poet and civil servant possessed a unique vision of this rather untidy thing called Englishness.They shared too an abolitionist tradition built on socialism and land reform.4 But such common ground made them awkward political bedfellows, and their relationship left them with simmering resentments over broken promises and failed paternity, particularly tenuous since Olivier’s employer, the British Empire, was a conglomerate of vast proportions. 23

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But McKay identified with free spirits of the Victorian era like Olivier who, as William Butler Yeats noted, had a predilection for Romanticism and self-destruction. Coming of age in the early twentieth century, McKay could also be very modern and keenly receptive to the “new criticisms and trends in poetry.” But he studiously avoided those “patterns, images, and words,” he explained, that might distinguish him as a classicist or modernist. He even boasted, with a bit of Jamaican bravado, of possessing an intellect that would not stretch to accommodate any philosophical schools of importance in the early twentieth century, except possibly internationalism. Those older traditions that he “adhered to,” the poet noted, were quite satisfactory for his “most lawless and revolutionary passions and moods” and gave him “the highest degree of spontaneity and freedom.” As the first black English poet of the century as well, he announced confidently, “I own allegiance to no master.”5 McKay traveled a middle passage, not just genealogically, from Africa to the New World, but aesthetically, from the vulgar to the sublime, high to low, peasant to gentry, black to white—and he wove those interests into a creative tapestry of diaspora. This poetic mentoring begins, metaphorically, in this twilight of a waning Victorian era, in London, which was the face and soul of McKay’s empire, with a middle-class youthful uprising against the politics of “the kitchen”— motivated by what playwright George Bernard Shaw called “a little bud of middle-class social compunction.”6 It was the “mechanization of industry and profit-making,” a twenty-seven-year-old Olivier wrote in 1886, which had eroded the cohesion of society. In substituting “for flesh, potted meat,” and “converting workers into undifferentiated batches of ‘labour force,’ making they know not what for they know not whom,” the kitchen loomed over all human enterprise. John Stuart Mill and William Morris, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, had instigated this revolt with a convincing appeal to the garden set at midcentury. But by the 1880s it was quite obvious to Olivier “why it was that capitalist civilization should have been making the whole world hideous.”The real revolution, for these fin-de-siècle iconoclasts weaned on the glories of empire, would not come from Karl Marx, nor had it “yet taken form.”7 This thing of conquest and settlement and the causes of native wars and rebellions, Olivier realized after he had toured Jamaica in 1906 as colonial secretary,“are preliminary to those of industrial relations.”8 Such a perspective, though not earth-shattering, challenged an engrained lifestyle that had become dependent on an expendable proletariat abroad. Olivier did not buy the “out of sight, out of mind” solution to global abuse, and in his masquerade in the late 1880s as a junior clerk in the Colonial Office—one of the “routineers,” as Shaw called the civil servants responsible for oiling the machinery of imperialism—he attempted to change that.

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Olivier had sensed that all this talk about class warfare was admirable but hardly touched on the severity of the issue, which by the late Victorian era was spiraling out of control. In this encroaching modern era, so entangled in revolutionary fervor with “the new,” was this perception that society had become overly mechanical and had forsaken its humanity. The muddle, Olivier realized, had to do with uniformity.Though separated by some thirty years of geography and temperament, both McKay and Olivier expressed deep-seated horror at this “grand mechanical march of civilization.”9 Classes will vanish, Olivier was convinced, only when all “are Socialists and not before,” and it is unwise—and hardly profitable—to denounce every class but one’s own.10 All that does, he noted, is make one skeptical of “the Socialist’s capacities for sympathy.”11 Rather than appeal to propaganda, these radicals encouraged action— but not solely at the barricades.The problem, Olivier surmised, was that “the produce of labour applied to the earth” was sorely undervalued, and the question, “How are these means to be produced at least cost of such labour, and distributed most advantageously to society?” sidestepped in the rush to a worker’s paradise. Olivier, in attempting to answer that question, was willing to sacrifice his own kitchen, and “pull the lynch pin out of the capitalist system on which my class depended.”12 Sydney Olivier was born on April 16, 1859, in Colchester, England, eleven years after the appearance of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, an ideology he would quibble over with socialists, feminists, internationalists, economists, and vegetarians throughout his life. His father was a reverend, and his family descended from Irish immigrants and French Huguenots—a mix that enabled him to sympathize with irascible colonials such as George Bernard Shaw or Frank Harris, whose dispositions made them, Shaw wrote, more of “a foreigner in England than any man born in Wiltshire could possible be.”13 Olivier attended Corpus Christi College at Oxford and had aspirations for the lyrical; he collaborated on Poems and Parodies with a classmate, Henry Champion, who would become an arch political rival. Olivier had a love of literature and knew “immense masses of poetry and pages of Dickens” by heart. But, he admitted, it was not natural—or even creditable—for his generation to write poetry. Such an idle pastime was frowned on,“except as a satirical versifier.” Instead, he read a range of philosophical (and socialistic) tracts, which included Fournier, Comte, Schopenhauer, Mill, Morris, Marx, and Henry George, and decided early on to work against “the prevailing brutality of traditional British Toryism.”14 That was no easy task, and he enlisted a group of like-minded malcontents who were associated with the Land Reform Union. It was a lively crowd, this society, and included Annie Besant, a birthcontrol advocate and proponent of East Indian self-determination; the playwright and suffragist George Bernard Shaw; Sidney Webb and his wife,

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Beatrice, who wrote The Cooperative Movement in Great Britain, an analysis of labor and women’s issues; the educator Graham Wallas; William Clarke; Hubert Bland; and the novelist H. G. Wells. They eventually called themselves Fabians, and as Olivier reports in Fabian Essays, their motto was:“For the right moment, you must wait, as Fabius did, most patiently when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless.” In 1884, two years out of Oxford, Olivier began studying for the civil service exam that would take him to Jamaica and his larger socialism. It was a move, he recalled, that was strangely “inevitable and determined.” Olivier published “John Stuart Mill and Socialism” in To-Day, a free-wheeling journal popular with Fabians that described itself as an “unsparing assailant of modern forms of competitive anarchy.” The essay was a bit of a manifesto, although most everyone was issuing manifestoes of one sort or another, and summed up the attitude Olivier’s generation, those so-called versifiers, had toward the more scientific Marxism.15 “The ownership of land confers no more power,” he explained, “for social iniquity upon a man who enjoys it than it does the ownership of capital upon a mining firm or factory king. If it be unjust to expropriate the capitalist it is equally unjust to expropriate the landowner.” He enraged the more idealistic radicals when, after time spent as a civil servant in Africa, India, and Jamaica, he announced cynically that “African humanity” would have “a long row to hoe” before Communism spoke to its needs.This was just one instance of many in which Olivier went against the grain, as Shaw had pointed out, in being “none the less Olivier.”16 But when he dismissed the significance of class warfare—the soul and hellfire of the revolution—he was papered as an “Armchair Socialist.” “It is just this antagonism of classes which the Socialists of the Armchair cannot acknowledge,” remarked Henry Champion, a classmate from Oxford, in a reply to Olivier that was meant for all Fabians. (Shaw, of course, was another “Unsocial Socialist” who found the continual “shibboleths” of class war deafening.) “But it is precisely the recognition of its existence which defines the Socialist,” Champion pointed out, “and explains why he deliberately strives to fan the class-feeling of the workers into open flame.” Champion concluded,“There can be no peace till the enemy is vanquished and his arms taken from him.Therefore the more he desires peace the more vigorous are his blows, the louder his call to arms.”17 To Champion, socialism could not exist without a strident call to the barricades. Olivier took Champion’s criticism to heart, though he continued to view the problem as one of perspective, especially as to what constituted a working class. “It happens that in tropical countries,” he explained, “where white men cannot endure bodily labour, necessity and prejudice combine to establish among them the social conventions that the working class in the

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mixed communities shall be of the coloured race, and the corresponding, but not necessarily correlative, demand that the employers shall be white. So far as the division in industrial relations does really come to correspond with the race division, the class prejudices and class illusions that arise between the capitalist and proletarian sections of civilized societies energetically reinforce the race prejudices.” He associated this impulse with the myth of the Anglo-Saxon race, which was one of his—and later McKay’s—favorite harangues.18 His own contrary nature Olivier attributed to “a rather fatal facility of seeing several sides to many questions at the same time.” One wonders if the colonial governor considered himself, at those critical moments, a hybrid. He explained at one point:“I have two or three brains, and one is always criticizing the other. I shall never be a single-minded bigot.” All this gave him “the invaluable power of taking an objective view of his employer, the British Empire,” noted Shaw, and actually made him temperamentally suited to govern a creolized society. It was clear that by the end of his first term as governor, Olivier had outrun that odious label “Armchair Socialist” and was considered a rare species of radical—someone who had actually worked inside the system to implement change. In fact, Olivier wrote and thought, remarked Shaw,“and could only think and write, clean over their heads” in the Home Office, which did not help in communicating his desires for that ideal society.19 It is not only cultured and civilized races that know themselves, Olivier explained, nor was there wisdom in the West Indian planter or the diamondocracy of Africa. Those who are conquered survive to see, often, “that the conqueror is only a heavy-fisted brute, to whom they know themselves superior, not, indeed, in all valuable qualities, but in many of those which mankind most values and which are most distinctly human.”What keeps this resistance alive, Olivier reminded us, is the idea of race chauvinism. So long as a group remains a race, “their God, their will, their pride of place as a chosen people survives.”20 Debunking the myth of this race ideology—whether Anglo-Saxonism or an idealization of the primitive—was crucial for the success of his larger socialism. Such thinking on race seems to have influenced at least one early poem written by McKay, “The Dominant White,” which looks at this problem as part of the imperial ideology that oppresses the “lesser peoples.” Much like Olivier’s “White Man’s Burden”—that problematic archetype so loved by the English—McKay’s poem discourses on this so-called efficiency of race chauvinism. Black and yellow are maligned, and all are “hybridized” into “bastard” cultures. Olivier’s final “Truth”—along with “Beauty,” of course—crumbles under that oppressive skepticism. In an allusion to Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” the “king of kings”—Anglo-Saxon culture, the bane of Olivier and McKay’s ideal world—withers “boundless and bare” in its “civilization.” For McKay, this king of kings is also an insidious and pervasive thing, which will be ultimately humbled “down to dust.”“The Dominant White” directly addresses

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this “corporate consciousness,” as Oliver described it, that maintains the purity and nobility of empire: God gave you power to build and help and lift; But you proved prone to persecute and slay And from the high and noble course to drift Into the darkness from the light of day. He gave you law and order, strength of will The lesser peoples of the world to lead; You chose to break and crush them through life’s mill, But for your earthly sins to make them bleed: Because you’ve proved unworthy of your trust, God—He shall humble you down to the dust. You have betrayed the black, maligned the yellow; But what else could we hope of you who set The hand even of your own against his fellow; To stem the dire tide that threatens yet? You called upon the name of your false god To lash our wounded flesh with knotted cords And trample us into the blood-stained sod, And justified your deeds with specious words: Oh! you have proved unworthy of your trust, And God shall humble you down to the dust. The pain you gave us nothing can assuage, Who hybridized a proud and virile race, Bequeathed to it a bastard heritage And made the black ashamed to see his face. You ruined him, put doubt into his heart, You set a sword between him and his kin, And preached to him, with simple, lying art About the higher worth of your white skin! Oh White Man! You have trifled with your trust And God shall humble you down to the dust. But it is the tension between English liberalism and Jamaican Creole and the working out of those older traditions that makes this and other poems such as “The Little Peoples”—with their internal struggle and metaphoric double meaning—so dialogical, in the sense that Stuart Hall means.21 “The Dominant White” moves from the devastation in the Congo to abuses elsewhere, whether of workers in Panama or sharecroppers in the socalled geopolitical regime of the “New South.” This aesthetic shift encompasses Olivier’s socialistic Jamaica as well, as an ideal, where there is an

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“unending progression out of weakness and ignorance” toward strength and enlightenment. In breaking ranks and throwing in his lot with colonials such as McKay, Olivier with his armchair politics pricked at the very cultural supremacy of the metropolis—and those vanguard intellectuals in places like London, Paris, New York, Harlem, and Moscow whose mission was to enlighten the masses. Like McKay, Olivier off-centered and complicated the political discourse by equating (with his usual bit of irony and wit) foreign politics with African politics in a kind of global relativism.The intention was to show that Africa—and not England or Europe—was a more accurate description of the colonial mad scramble in the twentieth century, a world in which policies that supported “the extension of sovereignty, control and economic exploitation on the part of European Governments” were being legislated “over territories in the presence of less civilized or weaker peoples” by second-rate clerks in paper-cluttered boardrooms. The general politics of Europe had taken “the character and colour of the politics of the ‘scramble for Africa’—because all Foreign Politics,” Olivier announced,“had become African Politics.”22 One can imagine this in terms of a diaspora that touches upon all aspects of society where one is compelled to mix culturally and biologically. It is the racial and cultural hybrid that “finds himself very much alive,” Olivier realized, whose passions and desires are “not at all extinguished”—or ground under by oppression or abuse. In fact, just the opposite.“I do not go so far as to say that a man to be a good critic must be a hybrid,” Olivier remarked,“but I fancy it would be found to be pretty true.”23 The mentality of the hybrid produces a soul that makes one “vigorous and whole,” declares McKay in the poem “Mulatto,” written in 1922 when he lived in the United States. It is this that spurs the colonial on “unceasingly to win.” (And Olivier realized this as well.) Because I am the white man’s son—his own, Bearing his bastard birth-mark on my face, I will dispute his title to his throne, Forever fight him for my rightful place. There is a searing hate within my soul, A hate that only kin can feel for kin, A hate that makes me vigorous and whole, And spurs me on unceasingly to win. Because I am my cruel father’s child, My love of justice stirs me up to hate, A warring Ishmaelite, unreconciled, When falls the hour I shall not hesitate, Into my father’s heart to plunge the knife To gain the utmost freedom that is life.24

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Olivier believed that colonial outposts such as Jamaica were incubators for diversity, which he encouraged as governor. “Where the race-differentiation formula is held to,” the governor observed, it invariably increases discord. He found this to be true in Jamaica’s legal system.Though biased, it essentially did not differentiate between the races. (Over generations, for instance, one might expect to move in and out of several social categories.) In the United States, on the other hand, no amount of dilution would alter one’s racial identity, which was fixed, in sharp contrast to the mulatto, quadroon, and mustee of the Caribbean.25 In light of the “British West Indian conditions,” Olivier noted, so sharp a distinction between the races seemed an obvious disadvantage in terms of social and political progress. Intermarriage, then, Olivier reckoned, was not necessarily such a bad idea. Inevitably there was “something we call Human,” he remarked, “which is greater than one race or the other.” This composite, advocated by the U.S. abolitionist Frederick Douglass as well, is what everyone— but particularly the hybrid—aspires to.26 Those “final forms of truth” that hold one’s place in the world, Olivier realized, were tenuous at best and fundamentally destructive. Left to fester, these “truths” become the pain of “a warring Ishmaelite, unreconciled,” in McKay’s “Mulatto.” Though it can be read as a rage poem, a glimpse of “a searing hate within my soul,” the poem has an aesthetic message as well, embedded in the unraveling of empire, one that “only kin can feel for kin”—the Jamaican for the English, the colonial for the colonizer. And this is what makes the poet “vigorous and whole” again.27 McKay’s mulatto, ultimately, can be interpreted as a literary construct that enables the poet to articulate his own peculiar condition of exile and hybridity. It transcends W.E.B. Du Bois’s linear color line and speaks instead to a rich vernacular of intermediacy, echoing the desires and ambitions of another path toward wholeness, that of Douglass and other abolitionists whom McKay admired such as Thomas Clarkson. McKay reworks these abolitionist sentiments to become a part of his “cartography of resistance.”28 Olivier, too, as a result of his experiences in the colonies, understood the cultural and political situation taking shape in the early modern era. Most Europeans seemed incurably blind to the benefits of the solution and focused on the implications of its resolution.This seemed especially true in the Colonial Office, where Olivier and Sidney Webb were resident clerks.Young and restless, Olivier was frustrated by a “lack of contact with the realities” and the conditions of those “with whose affairs I was dealing.” Decisions in the Colonial Office that determined the lives of thousands were casually administered by, as Olivier says, “beef-witted brutes” and pimply faced adolescents. Such a sad state of affairs added a surreal air to the workings of empire.The cause of the Ashanti War, for instance, he attributed directly to an official who shuffled papers “on a crucial proposal sent home by the Governor of the Gold Coast

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for a mode of accommodation between the Queen and King Kofi.”29 This “routinization” of empire made the real work “rather flat.” Olivier longed to experience “the other as a full cup,” he noted, “saturated to the skin with energy,” where one was not skeptical of native impulses.30 Many in England, including Olivier, were of the opinion that “most Governors were exceedingly stupid”—and clueless about the storm of discontent in the colonies.31 Olivier, when his chance came, was determined to be a different sort of governor. In cutting through the muddle, Olivier added a comforting predictability to his socialist plan, which was hardly glorious and painfully statistical. Fabians, in fact, displayed little of the arrogance and heroism of the vanguard politics erupting throughout the world and were prone to err on the side of caution and convention. Like the Marxist’s withering away of the state, Fabians did believe that empire’s days were numbered; but in the meantime, they asked, what do you do with governments that are “capitalist-ridden” and behave like ferrets, used by poachers and other adventure capitalists as enforcers of rule and exploitation? Until real revolution is brought about, “private interests will be able to make wars at our expense, and with our armies, by simply promoting the pugnacity which distinguishes us.” The Fabian approach was to promote “autonomy,” an early version of self-determination, whether in the village or a city neighborhood.They called their revolutionary program “municipal socialism,” a respectable-enough name for what was, essentially, the decentralizing of the world. This became the underpinning of a later internationalism that McKay and others of his generation espoused. The Fabians, understandably, because of this perspective, were less concerned with the European wage-earning class, which was “taking its own course and reaping only what it has sown,” than with the “social organization of the whole Empire.” It seemed a grand idea that was long overdue.32 The year 1900 was important for Olivier and other reformers who were convinced that the forthcoming general election in England would turn on “the popularity of Imperialism,” and they issued a postimperial proclamation in the form of Fabianism and the Empire.33 In it, they advocated an “organized inter-nationalism” reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham’s conception of an intermediary form of governance, which would put the local back into the global. Another renegade in the Colonial Office, Sidney Webb, went on to explain that, “far from becoming obliterated or straightened out into a mechanical uniformity,” regional distinctions would be “differentiated even further than at present.” These early internationalists encouraged each “racial group or Nation-State” to pursue its own evolution and destiny, “intensifying thereby its characteristic faculties, and thus increasing the special services” that would enrich the world—and, more importantly, offer a future of possibilities.34 Translated into cultural terms, this meant sustaining a rich vernacular of poetry, as well as other artistic expressions. Fabianism and the Empire was written

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to convince those very same youths and clerks in the “great buildings” of the Colonial Office, but who lurk elsewhere, “in every place, however high,” of empire’s reach. McKay’s poem “New Forces” has that same Fabian edge and might be read as a tribute to the persistence of those clerks and middling bureaucrats of Olivier’s generation who imagined themselves subversives: They stir the depths of men and come to birth. I feel their mighty presence flaming near, Oh, hark, my soul! Their voices everywhere.35 This “mighty presence” presses against buildings and office cubicles, in great cities and in the hulls of ships—and in the depths of gold mines. One is reminded of Bartleby’s solitary yet determined rebellion against U.S. industry in Herman Melville’s mid-nineteenth-century novel, and McKay too had looked to a revolt of the educated working masses—those who maintained the regularity of a vast imperial machine throughout England and the world. “Pale youths” are this movement’s vanguard—neither white nor black, working nor middling, elite nor proletarian.36 Such was the Fabian revolution that guided McKay throughout his life. As promised, when Olivier arrived in Jamaica in 1897, he behaved more like a prime minister than a despot, which had been the legacy until then. In fact, he presented a startling new approach for winning over the colonials, part of a “larger socialism.”37 There would be resistance to his visionary program, which oddly seemed tolerated by the Home Office (one wonders how inept or insurgent that office really was). The resistance came from vested global companies like United Fruit, which “had a way of behaving as if the land belonged to the United States,” Shaw noted. But their outright opposition, Olivier believed, would not get in the way of his “democratic plan.” Those interests were diversified, as well, and had sunk their tentacles deep into native mainstays, such as the public tramway in Kingston, which was controlled by a Canadian company.38 Instead of giving in to the popular will, which was opposed to a fare increase on the trams, company officials condemned the Gleaner, Kingston’s daily newspaper, whose editor, Herbert G. de Lisser, had been sympathetic to Olivier’s social vision and had insulted the mayor after he sought to resolve the problem fairly. Apparently, it wasn’t fair enough. Faced with a grassroots boycott and civil disobedience, the company finally called upon “the forces of law and order to take action.” But their fears of civil lawlessness rang hollow, and even those who did not ride the tram were outraged by the way the company behaved.39 The “Tramway Question,” as the impasse that lasted over a week was called, seemed to be about autonomy as well, which in Jamaica and elsewhere had reached “a very serious stage.” On the weekend of February 24, 1912, violence erupted, provoked when the

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police read the “Riot Act,” according to the cover of the Gleaner for February 27. At that time, McKay was a few months out of the police force himself— a career he fell into and out of quickly, with Olivier’s help—and in a moment of fervor aimed more at his superior, Inspector Kershaw, who called in the police, penned “Passive Resistance,” the first of many of his poems in which community will triumphs.The poem is a tribute to the commuters, made up of clerks and domestics, who were courageous enough to act disobediently in protesting the fare increase.The strike, it seemed, as well as his brief encounter with Kershaw when he was a cadet in Kingston’s constabulary, pushed McKay to the side of revolt. But it took several hits “flush on his occiput,” remarked Shaw, before Olivier awoke to the full extent of that outrage.To his credit, the governor made a personal appeal for calm and spoke to the rioters clearly and logically, as if they were socialist comrades at a lecture hall at which a few ideological differences merely needed ironing out. “Any man or woman who addresses a native Jamaican,” Olivier believed, “with reasonable civility and without condescension or assumption—that is to say, in a rational and proper human manner—will find himself outrun in nine cases out of ten by the natural and kindly courtesy and good-will of the reply and reception he will receive.”40 Even when confronted with an angry protester who battered the door of a newspaper office, Olivier “handled him as he had handled Graham Wallas in his college days,” Shaw mused.41 But this time, the rioters told the governor to step aside. Olivier was a brave and honorable citizen, but, as one demonstrator argued, “we mean to get square with these police.”42 Olivier nurtured their respect and viewed his role as governor as “the only power that stood between the black proletariat and their pitiless exploitation by the West Indian Planters.”And so he urged the demonstrators to go about their business but to leave the police, whom he was obliged to protect, alone.43 It was a delicate moment, and one that needed poetic justice. McKay’s poem, which appeared in the April 6, 1912, issue of the Gleaner, speaks to Olivier’s dilemma. It is written in the steady hand of a peasant intellectual who has an understanding of the situation and lets a well-intended but befuddled governor in on the ground rules of colonial resistance. “Passive Resistance” is penned so persuasively that it would have convinced even Governor Eyre, the notorious “butcher of Jamaica,” of the faultiness of his ways:44 There’s be no more riotin’ Stonin’ p’lice an’ burnin’ cars; But we mean to gain our rights By a strong though bloodless war. We will show an alien trust Dat Jamaicans too can fight

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An’ dat while our blood is hot, They won’t crush us wi’ deir might. Hawks may watch us as dey like, But we do not care a pin; We will hold “the boys” in check, There’ll be no more riotin’. We are sorry, sorry much For the worry given some; But it will not last for aye,— Our vict’ry day shall come. There are aliens in our midst Who would slay us for our right; Yet though vipers block the way We will rally to the fight. We’ll keep up a bloodless war, We will pay the farthings-fare An’ we send the challenge forth, “Only touch us if you dare!”45 These are powerful insights from a former police cadet and a promising young poet. But McKay also knew that Olivier was a sympathetic governor who identified with native aspirations for autonomy against those “aliens in our midst / Who would slay us for our right.” After the “flinty hard” Inspector Kershaw read the Riot Act, civilians were fired upon. One person was killed and thirty were injured. Olivier’s own hesitancy and indecision, though, revealed a shift in loyalties (the civil disobedience was really not the issue for him; saving policemen’s lives was).The way Olivier responded to the situation “made the Foreign Office afraid of him,” noted Shaw, and “prevented his promotion to any of the few governorships that could be considered more important than that of Jamaica, had he not himself had enough of colonial exile and pressed for central work.”46 But for the governor, there was a valuable lesson in this.When Olivier’s Jamaica:The Blessed Island was published years later, in 1933, the author could chuckle to himself that “no one in England who reviewed it understood what it was about, namely, the invincible obstinacy and capacity of African radicals who refuse to do what they do not chose to do, and will wait as long as need be to show their hand. That, and the same in other non-pink peoples, is what will be discovered when the mess becomes general.”47 The “mess” was a strident self-determination that would be waged, as McKay had explained, in a “bloodless war.”And in every situation, Olivier’s style of rule clashed with “official Kiplingism” and disrupted the smooth routine of island commerce, which had progressed uninterrupted from the

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beginnings of the slave trade. Much of that routine—then and now—revolved on foreign investors and absentee landlords. Olivier, however, wrapped his socialism in common sense rather than in brash acts of revolution, and McKay too chose that middle way forward—as farmer, sailor, English lyricist, internationalist, feminist.48 That longing for Jamaica, finally, was more than a sentimental heartbeat for a racial home. It was for a political and aesthetic island of promise. The lush colonial landscape and its sweet beauty had the ring of poetry for Olivier, in its everlasting beat of truth and beauty, and he soon began to see “the soil, the whole land” from the perspective of a British West Indian, he admitted. It was the same in every country that he had visited as an official of the Colonial Office—“the soil and the configuration of the earth were his first interest.”49 Land reform, in fact, had always been at the heart of the issue for Fabians, who had been swayed by the land-value arguments in Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, which appeared in 1879. In England, George was read against August Comte’s notion of community and John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism. For Olivier, an unabashed admirer of Mill and Comte as well, it was easy to see George’s application of land usage in terms of utility. One’s relationship to land, essentially, is derived from the pleasure it brings in its use. Olivier applied a “Fabian grasp” of the situation in Jamaica, remarked Shaw, particularly in his dealings with “the appalling social danger of the imperial instincts” that had kept “Downing Street under the thumb of a handful of planters in the face of millions of black proletarians.”50 But Olivier was a realist too and had “no Kiplingesque idolatry of the Empire.” He was, in fact, quite blunt about its breakup, as long as lands and communities were to remain autonomous. Jamaica, and the political possibilities it presented, made Olivier realize that land was central to the contours and aspirations of his Fabian dream. Absentee landlords benefited no one, least of all the peasant, as Olivier quickly discerned from his vast travels throughout the colonies. Such land was “abused,” and its pleasures and wealth kept from the community. (For Olivier, land must be accessible to the public, as well as maintained for future use, a philosophy that still dominates many parts of rural England.) It does not matter at all whether one’s route is blocked on a morning stroll in Limpsfield, England, or by a gate alongside an abandoned sugar plantation outside Kingston. Such a notion of land, as George explains, touches on “all natural materials” and becomes a crisis only when those things that are “freely supplied by nature” get revalued as capital. George believed that land, much like society, was “an organism” and “not a machine” with slots for coins.51 Inspired by a series of lectures by George in England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1884, Fabian socialists took their cause to the streets and lecture halls,

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issuing broadsides and manifestoes. Fabian Essays appeared in 1889, the year a proletarian victory in the dockworkers’ strike was predicted. Instead of with confrontation, the Fabians approached society from that “full cup” of Olivier’s measured optimism. There was a range of essays: “Economic” (Shaw), “Historic” (Sidney Webb), “Industrial” (William Clarke), “Moral” (Olivier), and “Property” (Wallas).52 Annie Besant tackled “Industry” and explained how it was uniquely gender biased to oppress women and children.53 In 1893, the Fabians formed the Independent Socialist Party and appealed to moderates and suffragists.All this was part of the Fabian strategy: to take “The Cause” off the barricades and make it “constitutional and respectable.” But the Fabian mindset, they emphasized, was as varied and interconnected as the world.Those more familiar with the drumbeat of Marxism, they assured,“need not fear oppression here, any more than in the socialized State of the future, by the ascendancy of one particular cast of mind.”54 Instead of divisiveness and special interests, Fabians espoused empathy and diversity. By 1900, their manifestoes became increasingly international in scope and combined political and land reform. They viewed the crisis between the haves and have-nots as a global one whose solution was in local autonomy and expression. All this had a profound influence on Claude McKay, whose writing reflected this zeitgeist and synthesis, which Olivier obviously encouraged. The poet became the voice for a new colonial sensibility of adaptability and hybridity, accommodation and diversity, which was so much a part of that early Fabian credo. In fact, one can read some of the later poems such as “International Soul” as lyrical longings for this Fabian ideal of land and condemnations of the ecological and human dislocation that was taking place in the colonies. The poem also speaks to older traditions and asks for a “new birth” that will cleanse the earth of foul play. (Those traditions, too, are enriched as they migrated from the “cold lands” of Europe to the “sweet warmth” of a familiar “southland.”) As in “Mulatto,” this migration in “International Soul” makes one “vigorous and whole,” providing a “new purpose” to the international condition: As flower dust is driven down the wind, To touch and quicken the green life of earth, As symbolic swallows leave cold lands behind, For regions of sweet warmth and singing mirth: So shall thy thought be carried surely forth To the remotest dwelling of mankind, Breaking down obstacles to give new birth, New strength, new purpose to man’s boundless mind.55 Particularly after the Boer War and with the increasing influence of business interests upon government policy, Fabians believed that Western societies

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were ill equipped to handle the responsibilities of an egalitarian world and looked instead to the colonies. Homo sapiens, Olivier noted, were played out; humans were characterized by McKay as “the standard flocking of the sheeplike herd.”We shall have to go back as far as the Mesozoic age, Olivier added, “and begin again from jellyfish.”56 As World War I approached, Olivier began to realize that the colonies would be fodder for European extravagance, and at times, in appealing to the fire of moral indignation, he framed the issue in terms of a militant abolitionism, echoing Douglass’s thinking about the similarities of slavery to the modern wage system.“The soldier,” Olivier remarked, “is the only Englishman who is now legally a slave and an outlaw, retained in the service by force, and subject to a special form of law which sends him, without a jury, to prisons in which corporal punishment is still liberally inflicted.” And the business that this recruit conducts “interrupts the world traffic, upsets its arrangements, debauches its citizens and its newspapers, and is in every way a costly and intolerable nuisance.”When the South African Charter Company in Rhodesia carried out its exploitative activities, igniting the Lobengula and the first Matabele tribal wars, and received Cecil Rhodes’s blessings in the form of a “diamondocracy,” Olivier fumed. Disgusted, the Fabians declared:“We are no longer a Commonwealth of white men and baptized Christians.”The majority of our fellow subjects are “black, brown, or yellow; and their creed is Mahometan, Buddhist, or Hindoo,” whose creeds are ruled, they reminded home viewers in England,“by a bureaucracy as undemocratic as that of Russia.”57 To prevent this inhumanity, Olivier worked at demilitarizing Jamaica, aware that World War I would figure decisively in the colonies. He did all he could to see that his people did not carry the brunt of war, as victims or as recruits.58 “I remember when I was a school boy in Jamaica,” McKay mused, “the local militia was disbanded by the Governor.The local paper printed his statement that ‘such training for citizens is not necessary in an age of established peace, and anyway the people of the West Indies could not be concerned in any imaginary war of the future’.”59 Before his larger socialism could be realized, Olivier was convinced, land and military reform were needed. This “morality of private property,” as he characterized the abusive colonial system, was a slippery base from which to rule the many who were sorely disenfranchised and impoverished, and would be England’s ultimate downfall, he believed.60 The governor would prove to an empire and a world convinced of the altruism of its mission that the obedient, regimented black colonial who would maintain order and preserve prosperity was an impracticality doomed to backfire. Much of Olivier’s thinking about self-rule in the colonies came about as a result of his eight years with the Colonial Office in South Africa, where he

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witnessed massive devastation to land and native populations, motivated in large part by the scramble for diamonds. He was stunned by what he saw, and those horrors prompted him to write White Capital and Coloured Labour:The Anatomy of African Misery (1906). But the Caribbean sphere hardly fared better. There was, in fact, that same sense of disconnection. At Belize, for instance, Olivier encountered the acting governor’s private secretary, in a pressed white uniform, who “promptly took me for a walk through the town, showing, I thought, an amazing cheerfulness at the most depressing surroundings.” The house that was assigned to Olivier stood on a spit of “sand and ballast discharged from timber ships,” to Olivier’s amazement—a home more for sand flies and malaria.61 The real blight, Olivier discovered, was the indiscriminate monopolization of land by the British Honduras Company, which was responsible for clear-cutting tropical hardwoods such as mahogany and much of everything else in the way.With a good part of the forest destroyed, Belize had become, literally, an open cesspool and a breeding ground for disease. Even the streets had open trenches on either side for the disposal of wastes. Since owners were absent, there was little regard for the welfare of natives or of those second-rate clerks, for that matter, who valiantly maintained a semblance of normalcy.62 Olivier realized as he toured the Caribbean, initially as a representative of Sir Henry Norman’s Sugar Commission in 1890, that the so-called agricultural crisis was largely between sugar growers, holdovers from an eighteenth-century institution controlled by U.S. and European absentees, and banana entrepreneurs, made up of a new class of industrious natives, small landowners such as McKay’s family. Even here, one needed to take a side—and Olivier did. His study of the sugar industry made him realize, that the problem in the Caribbean ran deeper than soil erosion or cash-crop rotation, and so he became convinced that nationalization, in the Fabian way, might not be such a bad idea. The entrenched interests of the sugar oligarchy, which lingered into the twentieth century, would be very familiar to McKay and resonate in his lyrics as this class of invested business interests drifts from the island to the mainland. Sugar, Olivier warned, was simply “too dangerous a crop under present circumstances,” even though this “freight of debris,” as McKay describes it in one poem, seemed sorely marooned out at sea. In fact, the poem “The Intrenched Classes” brings to mind someone like Olivier, who struggled against the very forces of an enterprise—the British colonial system—that employed and nurtured him: Your power is legion, but it cannot crush, Because my soul’s foundation is cast-steel, And my myriads of unseen bodies rush From hidden bowers and shrines my wounds to heal.

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Against invested interests, the “green hungry waters” churn up the past, heaving “mammoth pyramids” to confront the present. Your petty irritants are tiny spears That cannot pierce through my protecting mail To mortal hurt, and all your Bourbon fears, Quite warrantable, never grinding down today, Like a great landslip moving to the sea, Bearing its freight of debris far away, Where the green hungry waters restlessly Heave mammoth pyramids and break and roar Their eerie challenge to the crumbling shore. “Bourbon fears” alludes not only to Olivier’s mixed French ancestry but also to European prejudices. For “the Negro and coolie” to develop at all, Olivier remarked, they must “come out of the plantation system and became small owners and cultivators for themselves.”This belief in the sustainability of the land—and in a class of landowners not entrenched or entangled—is essential for Fabian autonomy. So when McKay writes of withered crops in another poem, “Hard Times” (published at the start of Olivier’s first term as governor), he knew that literary readers such as Olivier would grasp the meaning of the image: the need for agricultural and community control. (The buccra, or plantation overseer, who is cooling in the shade in “Hard Times,” incidentally, reflects Olivier’s disdain for the plantation oligarchy as well, which has brought a curse upon “de lan’ I’d know.”)63 One way to disentangle the cursed sugar interests, for McKay and Olivier, was the cultivation of bananas, whose charm and power would “car’ de sway.”64 Published in Songs of Jamaica, the poem “King Banana,” an excerpt from which follows, describes how a plantation crop considered useless by transnational agribusinesses had integrated itself into the “community”—a naturalized way to introduce that larger socialism of which Olivier spoke. “Green Mancha,” McKay writes, is made for the “naygur man,” but it is a staple that a “buccra” fancies as well,“when it ripe.”65 Yet it is the “old way” of preparing banana that separates the colonial from the colonizer.“Dem eat it diffran’ way.” Some boil it in a “big black pan”—but it is “sweeter in a toas’.”The poet asks: Wha’ lef ’ fe buccra tach again Dis time about plantation? Dere’s not’in dat can beat de plain Good ole-time cultibation. Banana dem fat all de same From bunches big an’ ’trong; Pure nin’han’ bunch a car’ de fame,—

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Ole met’od all along. De cuttin’ done same ole-time way, We wrap dem in a trash, An’ pack dem neatly in a dray So tight dat dem can’t mash. We re’ch: banana finish sell; Den we ’tart back fe home: Some hab money in t’read-bag well, Some spen’ all in a rum. Green mancha mek fe naygur man, It mek fe him all way; Our islan’ is banana lan’, Banana car’ de sway. Unlike those days of King Rum or Sugar over which McKay sentimentalized, bananas would be a thoroughly integrated staple used to advantage by peasants and poets alike against the hegemonic impulse of empire. By the time of Olivier’s arrival, the trade in bananas had become an agricultural boom, “eclipsing sugar with astonishing rapidity.”66 Banana was a “humble but valued fruit” cultivated by slaves on their “provision grounds,” and one of the first crops introduced in the Caribbean, in the sixteenth century. For a long time it was resisted by the planters, which puzzled Olivier on his frequent tours of farms in the region, viewed more as “a backwoods ‘nigger business,’ ” as some had reported,“which any old-time sugar planter would have disdained to handle.”67 If they were tempted, even by “undeniable prospects of profit,” the cultivation was done reluctantly. Such an attitude fueled Olivier’s determination to make banana cultivation “respectable,” and in 1899 he encouraged native landowners to make the transition to this peasant-based economy. To protect their economic foothold against the whims of empire, the Banana Cooperative was established; it became the profitable Banana Producers Association in 1927.68 This, for Olivier, was an example of the real thing: native “councils” at work, based in part on a Fabian concept of “municipal socialism.”At the time McKay wrote “King Banana,” the poet was about to embark on a career as a plantation farmer and had applied to Tuskegee Institute to study agriculture, and bananas did indeed seem to carry “de sway” in his movements abroad. In this vocation, he found an inspiring lesson that would stay with him for a very long time. Olivier, like most Englishmen of the era, was an avid walker and naturalist. As he settled in as governor, he observed that life in the colonies took on a rhythm of its own, which put him in awe.That rhythm held not only for those who traveled there, but also for plants, those that appeared accidentally as well

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as the hybridized varieties.“The most extraordinary revolution,” he gushed at one variety, was that of “the mahogany tree.” In a mere week’s time, its leaves turn yellow, wither, and then, suddenly, reappear—a “vegetable tour de force.”69 During longer excursions, Olivier was fond of keeping a diary, and in 1891 he recorded his first experiences in the “high bush” of Caledonia, which was “full of splendid palms, but not many other fine timber trees, most of the valuable wood having been cut out long ago.” He wrote to his wife, Margaret: “The track we rode on was a good deal grown up with growing bush that had been cut out for a year, and the bushes were consequently six and seven feet high; that being a moderate rate of growth here. In other places the track was filled with Coleus plants, that variegated-bright foliage. One sees some splendid ones in gardens here, dark maroon leaves with gold borders.The wild ones in this bush are rather blotchy and ugly.”70 Olivier’s infatuation with nature was hardly unusual. Increasingly, gardening was seen as a way of softening the hard edge of imperialism, and its scientific sister, horticulture, searched the remotest corners of the world for unique specimens.71 It developed a unique language between the homeland and the colonies, which McKay, as its modern-day son of the soil, mastered. Margaret Olivier, who first met her future husband, Sydney, in the late 1870s, recalled that “we did not talk about anything unconnected with the country we were in.” Sydney Olivier privileged the natural and native while defiling borders. “Often I was disconcerted,” Margaret Olivier remarked, “by his habit of taking short cuts across farms and fields. He had no respect for notice boards, where he said our trespassing could do no harm.” He later became involved with the Commons Preservation Society and advocated for more open spaces. (In Jamaica, he actively planned those spaces.) When “a little wood” blocked their path with a stern “Notice to Trespassers,” recalled Margaret Olivier,“the obstruction, as often as we met it, was flung without more ado into the ditch.” Such behavior created the image of Olivier as a “firebrand” among staid English homeowners.72 As governor, Olivier was an entirely new element in the social strata of colonial Jamaica.“So strenuous was his energy,” remarked Herbert G. de Lisser, the editor of the Gleaner,“so original his point of view, that he soon began to affect most other receptive persons, thus gradually changing the ethos or the character of Jamaica permanently.”73 He introduced health and safety standards that eliminated malaria (a result of those first glimpses of Belize), and he improved building techniques to insure against earthquakes and hurricanes. (In 1903, a hurricane had destroyed most of the island, and in 1907, an earthquake and fire leveled Kingston, leaving many, including McKay, homeless.) Olivier remade Kingston’s business district, with grassy open parks and gardens. In 1911, he toured the Canal Zone in Panama and the Republic of Costa Rica to observe the condition of Jamaican laborers, and it was rumored

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that McKay’s Songs of Jamaica were, soon after, distributed as gifts, remembrances of home.74 The Oliviers were expected to reside at Flamstead, which was tucked away in the Royal Mountains, entirely too remote for a bustling family with several daughters. The “great house,” as it was called by locals, was associated with the inanities of Eyre, that “butcher of Jamaica.” As befitting the island’s first socialist governor, Olivier built a humbler cottage closer to Kingston, much like the one in Limpsfield where he had entertained Russian anarchists Peter Kropotkin and Serghei Stepiak, H. G. Wells, Octavia Hill, and Henry Nevinson. He hoped to carry on that tradition in a more rustic setting, and he did, with Walter Jekyll and McKay. Olivier surmised that a cottage any farther away would be a grave error and reminded himself that had Eyre, who was governor in 1865, “not stayed 4,000 ft. up in the clouds of Flamstead,” the Morant Bay rebellion might not have occurred. Olivier definitely did not want a repeat of that history.75 Although John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Henry Huxley thought Eyre’s brand of English justice excessive, Olivier considered Eyre “a champion specimen of an exclusive British and Anglican type.”76 He continually invoked that specimen whenever troubles arose, and he brought his views to the public in The Myth of Governor Eyre, a blistering attack published in 1933 on the follies of colonialism. When McKay, however, does his own invoking of another Englishman in “George William Gordon to the Oppressed Natives,” he poses a moral dilemma to Olivier, who was a member of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society and saw himself as part of an English abolitionist tradition.77 “Keep before you Clarkson’s name!” McKay warned the poem’s readers in the United States, England, and the Caribbean: Ef your groans win de fight, Jes’ to put do’n dis great shame Lawful ’tis to use our might. Thomas Clarkson died in 1846, some twenty years before the Morant Bay rebellion, but he had taken his cause to France, Russia, and, temperamentally, Africa, where he acquired, for McKay at least, some degree of international significance. In the poem, McKay conflates geographies and histories: Clarkson and Gordon, England and Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, Eyre and Olivier. (Rightly, the poem struck a nerve with modern-day suffragists in England such as the Quaker Jacob Bright and Richard Marsden Pankhurst, who transformed an early twentieth-century women’s support group, the Men’s League for Woman’s Suffrage, into an international cause with members in Europe, England, the Caribbean, and the United States.) “Gordon’s heart bleeds for you,” the poet intoned, sounding that abolitionist legacy and clearly directing the “you” to an approving audience. Gordon’s class and color—as a

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mulatto and hybrid—symbolized this revolt, a reminder that the smooth functioning of race ideology was impossible as early as 1865. He will lead to victory: We will conquer every foe, Or togeder gladly die. As a manifesto for universal freedom, “George William Gordon to the Oppressed Natives” appeared when “the Boer was expressing something of the spirit of the South African Union,” the London editor T. P. O’Connor explained in his introduction to the poem in 1912. It was part of that general “ethnic awakening” emerging throughout the world that would lead to Alain Locke’s New Negro some thirteen years later.Yet like “Mulatto,” it expresses emotions that “only kin can feel for kin,” for Jamaicans as well as the English.78 Although Olivier’s new home was not as remote as the official governor’s residence—Fort George, as Olivier affectionately called it, was a mere sixteen hundred feet up in the hills and a half hour’s drive west of Kingston—Eyre’s Flamstead manor loomed as a reminder of failed imperial promises. It had noticeably declined over the years, remarked the new official occupant, from “great” to a mere bungalow—which was fine for the Oliviers.The views were still breathtaking, however: below, the Caribbean Sea and Kingston Harbor and off to the side beyond “folded hills and dark forest rose the Peaks of the Blue Mountain range.” Flamstead had been associated with the sugar oligarchy and Eyre’s predilection for social balls and lawn parties. But at four thousand feet, to partake of the governor’s extravagance first required a vigorous alpine climb by horseback on a steep and winding bridle path.Thus, only the young or blindly ambitious attended—and consequently received the governor’s blessings and favors. The climb to Olivier’s cottage was almost as strenuous. But those who now arrived, at times unannounced, were of a different sort. Walter Jekyll, who edited McKay’s two volumes of Jamaican poems, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads—and who, like Olivier, was neither young nor ambitious—found the climb “up from his valley” invigorating. Olivier surmised that Jekyll had retired—or dropped out. A vegetarian of sorts, he “apparently does nothing but work in the garden.” Olivier thought Jekyll was “in the ‘Yogi’ line,” from his frail Gandhi-like appearance,“but I am not sure he is anything more than a loafer.”79 Jekyll, however, was another late Victorian intellectual, who, like Olivier, fell in love with the island and its potential. He went native and always arrived at the family’s cottage “on foot,” explained Olivier, “in sandals and clad in a white suit,” remarkably unblemished from the climb.80 Over the years, the governor developed a fondness for Jekyll, who was “somewhat of a recluse and kept to his hill home”; his vegetarian palate

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evoked youthful days of “organising the foundations of the Socialist Revolution” back in London, where, after indulging in “luscious cocoa and Hill’s wholemeal bread and butter,” a vegetarian feast prepared by Shaw and his mother, Olivier would hear the Irish editor Frank Harris deliver “a most impassioned incitement to arson and bombing.” The “food was delicious,” he most remembered, and he continued that tradition with Jekyll, feeding him “red pea soup and avocado pears” whenever he visited.81 What brought Olivier and Jekyll together, however, were not their ambitions or appetites, but their love of walking. Jekyll avoided automobiles—or anything mechanical, for that matter—and walked everywhere, high and low, on and off trails, into and out of the bush. (Being English, they also shared a passion for gardening and nature.) But Olivier’s persistence in walking everywhere aroused Creole indignation because of his image as an official of the Colonial Office and was a topic of gossip among Kingston’s elite.The West Indian standards of snobbishness amused him, where walking “meant something like loss of dignity, or at any rate prestige.” Yet he conveniently avoided the tramcar around which his career rode, much as Flamstead lulled Eyre into lethargy, preferring the walk from his home to social etiquette.82 Occasionally, McKay, Olivier, and Jekyll had heated discussions that lingered into the darkness, usually at Jekyll’s cottage, where the custom was to spend the night, the trip home being dangerous. On one occasion, Jekyll said that only McKay was staying, since he was his “special friend.”83 But Olivier’s request to stay as well seemed motivated less by the potential for sexual intrigue than by his fear of traveling at night, which in the Jamaican hillsides, he explained, was “rather disagreeable.” One’s horse, he pointed out, “sees a wall of rock on one side of it and edges to the other where he sees nothing, and likes to walk on the grassy weedy edge where one can’t see whether there is really any ground or only bush growing up from below.”84 Olivier not only fantasized Jamaica as a political tabula rasa, but also viewed Caribbean poetry as an exciting new expression. McKay had complimented Olivier as a “literary governor,” and Olivier reciprocated by reading McKay’s poems in manuscript.A lover of verse, he quickly realized “the talent they exhibit.”85 Yet he could also be tyrannical if anything or anyone got in the way of his blessed island.With McKay, Olivier met a native intellectual—one of his so-called hybrid critics—who pricked holes in his utopian fantasy and his image of himself as a committed socialist. As with his inability to deal squarely with the tramline strike, Olivier was unable to accept true “folk expression,” it seemed, conveyed through the lively critical mind of a “hybrid.” This inability revealed Olivier’s insecurities, or dishonesty, as a radical. McKay decided to add, at the last minute, the poem “De Gubnor’s Salary” to Songs of Jamaica, which he began assembling around 1911. (It appeared in 1912, published in London and Kingston.) Jekyll, who helped with the

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poems, knew the importance of the governor’s imprimatur, especially as he was well connected with liberal circles in London and New York whose ears were tuned to emerging colonial talents. To appeal to the governor’s vanity, Jekyll convinced McKay that a dedication would show that Olivier’s larger socialism was clearly at work, if judged by the quality of this verse. McKay agreed and noted in the dedication that Olivier’s “sympathy with the black race had won . . . the admiration of all Jamaicans.” But McKay thought Olivier’s socialism could be a tad more exemplary. Around the island, at frequent socialist lectures at the Institute of Jamaica, in Kingston, and elsewhere, Olivier had a reputation for urging peasants to do more with less.86 McKay probably remembered one of those harangues and called Olivier on it—and what better way than with “De Gubnor’s Salary,” a poem that represented a parting shot at the wallet? (“We thought that for a small and poor island like Jamaica,” the poet explained later,“a governor could do quite well on about 1,000 and traveling expenses, instead of 5,000, if the lavish entertainment were cut out.”)87 The Gleaner published the poem “with a footnote explaining why it was held back” (it would upset the governor), and it only added more fuel to the chorus of accusations that Olivier was decidedly “pro-negro and not pro-planter.”88 Coincidentally, the controversy over the poem occurred a few days before Olivier’s term as governor was to expire, and he looked forward to an appreciative footnote in the history of postcolonial Jamaica. In fact, everyone from peasant to church official had praised Olivier’s efforts, but he anguished over any bit of criticism.“I was in America by then,” recalled McKay of the clamor, “but I heard that the local sheets knifed him for [the poem] and, as he was unduly sensitive to criticism, I suppose he was quite put out.”89 The uproar continued amid accusations of mismanagement and rumors of subversive socialist “Land Schemes,” which singed the tongues of English conservatives and West Indian planters alike. It finally dawned on those at the Home Office that Olivier “should be kept out of the colonies at all cost.”90 Olivier returned to England in January 1913 and accepted an appointment as secretary to the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries. He returned to the life of a middling bureaucrat.Yet even in England there were rumblings of utopia and imaginary sightings of the governor embarking “on some mysterious and, possibly, Socialistic land campaign.”91 Such was the power and pull of Jamaica for poet and visionary alike.

C hap te r 3

For the Love of “de Red Seam” My thoughts often go back to my old home in Surrey, thirtyodd miles from London. It was a paradise for boys, with its shrubberies full of birds’ nests, its orchards of apples, and— greatest of all—its two large ponds where we fished in summer and skated in winter. Would there be bearing ice or not?—that for us was the great question as the end of the year approached. —Walter Jekyll, “Memories of Home Land”

After living in Jamaica for some twenty years, childhood images of England as home still had an unshakable hold on Walter Jekyll, McKay’s Jamaican mentor, and on his sense of a Jamaican aesthetic. In fact, the island paradise was perceived with the same fervor by expatriates and romantics alike—the upper-class gentry such as Jekyll who had become alienated from English society, as well as colonial administrators such as Sydney Olivier who sought to ply their socialistic ideas. David Cannadine, in Orientalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, explains this in terms of a nostalgia for the idyllic. For these romantic imperialists, as Cannadine characterizes them, societies overseas seemed purer, less corrupt, than England’s. As London, that idealized metropolis, became shabby and torn as the result of industrialization, its social institutions in disarray, places like Jamaica were viewed sympathetically and in need of protection “from the very same forces of modernity that were destroying traditional Britain.”1 Administrators such as Olivier and expatriates like Jekyll saw themselves as trustees, even though they were perceived as eccentric, self-centered, or aristocratic. In the colonies, these trustees felt an ever-pressing obligation to protect the local communal lifestyles and economy from the horrific effects of European capitalism. Jamaica, in its radical boom years from 1907 to 1913, had attracted an assortment of visionaries, social misfits, poets, and reformers en masse, or so it seemed. Olivier, a determined Fabian socialist, had become governor during this time, and there was talk of sweeping changes that bordered on utopian and caused concern at Downing Street.The island with a history of rum and 46

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revolt, tucked away in some remote isolated geography (from the English point of view), became a refuge for those fleeing sexual and religious—even literary—conformity in the twentieth century such as Walter Jekyll, an Anglican minister who was deceptively conventional, and the Scottish poet Thomas MacDermot, who published a “literary” newspaper, Jamaica Times. MacDermot mentored McKay, in Scottish verse by Robert Burns and others, and had written one of the first Creole romances, One Brown Gal and—A Jamaican Story. The novel created a minirenaissance of sorts in the vernacular when it appeared in 1909, which helped carve a niche for later dialect writers such as McKay. (MacDermot’s verse, as well, was regularly featured in the Gleaner, under the pseudonym “Tom Redcam.” MacDermot was considered at the time one of Jamaica’s best poets.) Jekyll immediately fell in love with the island and its people. “I believe I am the only person who lives in Jamaica for pleasure,” he wrote in the Garden, a well-respected horticultural journal in London.2 Like most who visited from the British Isles, he arrived ill and sickly, but more of spirit than body, a general sagging of that late Victorian optimism so characteristic of the English. He brought along a passion for gardening, which he acquired from his “old home in Surrey,” a quaint, folkish village where most everyone had a cottage garden. To his older sister in London, Gertrude, who chronicled some of those gardens and folkways, Jekyll sent botanical field reports on the amazing varieties brought to the island from around the world.3 The Hope Garden near Kingston, which he instigated, rivaled Kew Gardens in England, then the most famous center in commonwealth plant taxonomy. Gertrude Jekyll had just become the editor of the Garden when Walter arrived in Jamaica, and she promised to cover every aspect of colonial and English gardening in the Americas,Africa,Asia,Australia, the Caribbean, and Europe. (She was also a well-respected figure in the Arts and Crafts decorative arts field.) Walter Jekyll would become a regular correspondent in the magazine’s pages. He had met Claude McKay, then eighteen, on one of his many arduous excursions into the countryside to document the jammas and traditional rhymes that had become part of the oral slave history of the Caribbean.Walter’s work at collecting the vernacular folk expression in and around the Clarendon Hills outside Kingston, where McKay lived, mirrored his sister Gertrude’s work in West Surrey, a tiny hamlet on the outskirts of London. Both ways of life were quickly vanishing, threatened by modernity and popular culture. In West Surrey, the danger was creeping cosmopolitanism; in Jamaica, it was residual imperialism (part of that obstinate ornamental gloss that flourished despite native dissatisfaction).4 But Walter Jekyll’s research touched on the symbiotic relationship between Africa and Europe that produced new, more vibrant art forms, such as the jammas, and it was exceedingly thorough for someone with little formal training in ethnography.The late Victorian era

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had given rise to many an amateur scientist and philosopher, particularly in the uncontested scholarship of the backcountry vernacular of Jamaica. Nearly three hundred years of colonization and displacement were covered in Jekyll’s Jamaican Song and Story: Annancy Stories, Digging Sings, Ring Tunes, and Dancing Tunes, published by the London Folk-Lore Society in 1907. His passion for the topic was evident. Jekyll’s decision to live in Jamaica was not based upon duty, tradition, or invested interests; he felt at home in the country and among its people, whom he characterized as “its dusky inhabitants, with their winning ways and their many good qualities.”5 It may seem odd that this conservative upper-class Englishman who had found the liberal Jamaican governor’s own meddling English ways troubling should embark on a study of Creole culture in the remote hilltops of Jamaica, especially as these folkways were seen as devices to resist English order. But that may have been Jekyll’s very intention. Jekyll had been living a life of “modified Buddhism” for nearly eleven years, what his older brother, Herbert, dubbed “a philosopher’s life of plain living and high thinking.” During that time, Jekyll called upon McKay, visited his new neighbor, the socialist governor of Jamaica, Sydney Olivier, and undertook arduous walks in the bush. Over time, he became intimate with the poet in ways that would have been impossible in England because of class and convention, and they spent hours reading or strolling along garden pathways. One imagines a rustic Wordsworth, Shelley, or Keats transplanted to Caribbean shores, and their friendship offered an idyllic moment that obliterated the legacy of slavery and the Middle Passage.When the cosmopolitan and worldly Herbert visited in 1912 with his wife, Agnes Graham, a Times of London columnist, to celebrate the publication of Walter’s fourth book, The Wisdom of Shopenhauer as Revealed in Some of His Principal Writings, the couple puzzled over the younger brother’s refusal to venture beyond the metropolis of Kingston; he had no desire to visit family in Surrey or elsewhere for that matter, except in his imagination.6 Life, for Walter Jekyll, was a texture of reinvigorated tradition and little rebellions against the status quo. (He lived in Jamaica for thirty-four years with few modern distractions or regrets and was eulogized as a musician, gardener, philosopher, teacher, and writer—as a native son, as close as any non-Jamaican could be, which would have pleased him.)7 At his funeral in 1929, his brother Herbert made note of a dearth of material possessions: There was nothing to carry back with him to England, no examples of a grand Anglo-Saxon presence. But Herbert thought in sweeping imperial terms. He was the model Englishman, true to the traditions of an “R.T.E. officer” and imperial England. Though he was described, as was Walter, as “shy and retiring,” Herbert more than compensated by combining shyness with “the highest standards of efficiency and thoroughness,” which epitomized order and rule.8

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Herbert attended the Royal Military Academy, where he graduated in 1866 with a degree in engineering. Nine years later, at the age of twenty-nine, he volunteered for a tour of duty in Ghana. Tribal warfare had erupted between the Fanti Confederation, which was supported by the British, and the Ashanti Confederation of the interior. In 1875, when Herbert was sent to Africa, these conflicts became known as the Ashanti Wars, a result of unfulfilled promises after the British Colonial Office purchased the colony from Denmark in 1850.9 Like other ambitious class-conscious Englishmen, Herbert began his career at the Colonial Office but moved to where he felt real power rested: the War Office. Unlike Olivier, however, he did not have utopian ideas. He rose through the ranks and served as a captain and colonel under Lord Carnarvon, the secretary of state for the colonies, where he was assigned to protect British interests in Ireland, Africa, and other parts of the newly formed commonwealth. In 1879, as secretary to Carnarvon, he presided on the Royal Commission on the Defence of British Possessions and Commerce.As a member of the upper-class gentry, Herbert took to diplomacy with ease and grace, and as an engineer of public works projects he traveled to Europe as part of the Royal Commission for the Paris Exhibition of 1900, where he patched up Anglo-French relations that were fractured over colonial infighting during the Fashoda crisis of 1898 in the Middle East and the accompanying South African War.10 For Herbert, Englishness swept away fine nuances of geography and place. Much of what Herbert stood for understandably disturbed Walter. Yet Herbert’s adventures in West Africa as a royal engineer and representative of the War Office were touched by an interest in the new field of horticulture, which mimicked the population shifts and moves of the early twentieth century. Gardening was a Jekyll mark of distinction and was worn as an emblem of the family’s class. Herbert, like Gertrude and Walter, was an enthusiastic proponent of gardening; he saw its application in the colonies as a way to maintain—as his wife, Agnes Graham, a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and an avid gardener herself, noted—“oldestablished standards” that “in many cases disappeared during the recent years of upheaval,” the result of war, mass production, and popular culture. For Agnes, salvaging recipes that were rich in folkloric traditions was her revolt against the encroaching cosmopolitanism of the twentieth century: “When homes dissolve and re-form, or the main prop of a household is withdrawn, it is often found that a good tradition or a valued formula, painstakingly acquired, has vanished beyond recovery, and that the pleasant things we enjoyed in youth . . . have all been swept irrevocably down Time’s rolling stream.”11 Herbert put those same cottage-garden recipes to work in Africa. When the English government purchased the country’s telegraph system in 1870 and

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placed it under the Post Office, engineers were expected to know telegraphy. And when the first expeditionary forces arrived in Africa in 1873, Herbert was responsible for erecting telegraph lines into the interior. Herbert found that the aloe species (which he called Agave telegraphica) could be used creatively to hide “unsightly poles”—a novel attempt at naturalizing the disruptions of colonization:“This highly ornamental plant flourishes best by the side of roads and on railway embankments and I can strongly recommend it, . . . feeling it would succeed admirably at the ends of the high-road at the foot of your lawn, where it would be seen to great advantage from your drawingroom windows.”12 The “drawing-room windows,” where an English hedge and mahogany paneling redefine the terrain, neatly complement McKay’s “The Biter Bit,” a dialect poem written around the same time. This poem, in the lines that follow here, introduces another perspective, that of an elderly woman gazing out from her cottage-garden “kitchen doo’.” Interior and exterior worlds collide in the poem, and one wonders, in their encounter, what is syncretized and what obscured, a question that impairs Herbert’s field of vision. Both engineer and “ole woman” are isolated in a strange and unyielding land. Ole woman sit by kitchen doo’ Is watchin’ calalu a grow, An’ all de time a t’inking dat She gwin go nyam dem when dem fat. Does her vantage from the door fill in the edges of this familiar yet estranged drawing-room picture, where nature and its bountiful harvests are asked to support colonization? Herbert ponders “unsightly poles,” and the old woman reluctantly becomes a collaborator to this colonizing gaze. Corn an’ peas growin’ t’ick an’ fas’ Wid nice blade peepin’ t’rough de grass; An’ ratta from dem hole a peep, T’ink all de corn dem gwin’ go reap. A natural cycle plays out around her, but it unfolds off-register, as do most things in the colonies. How do we interpret the dynamic between the peasant farmer who feels entitled to the corn harvest, and a rat that simply needs to eat? Is the rat that “unsightly pole” that refuses to “bend” into the background? The poet explains: “But Quaco knows a t’ing or two,” and puts out a “little meal” for those who have a “fas’ fas’ mout’.” In a similarly themed poem,“Reapers” by Jean Toomer, this “fas’ fas’ mout” becomes a rat that represents both predator and victim. In Toomer’s poem, the rat symbolizes the natural world and is forced to scavenge because of the “machine”—encroaching

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civilizing influences. It must compete against the progress of this “reaper,” and the end of the harvest results in its death: Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done, And start their silent swinging, one by one. Black horses drive a mower through the weeds, And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds, His belly close to ground. I see the blade, Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.13 In contrast, the rat, for McKay, is a reminder of the incompleteness of the imperial gaze. It is the blur within the otherwise picture-perfect pastoral. But in “The Biter Bit,” we never are sure of the real predator. Is he colonizer or colonized? (This is of concern to a poet such as McKay, who will go on to claim Englishness on his own ground.) The poem, then, is about entitlement and touches on the issue of land-use reform, the Fabian approach that so influenced McKay’s thinking, moving imaginatively from Herbert’s tamed drawing-room to the old woman’s kitchen door, so conveniently hinged by her Jamaican cottage garden.These two perspectives are knitted into an overlaid image of the “land,” which becomes, metaphorically, a vast countryside beyond London, its metropolis. Much like a stereoscope, there is a sliding back and forth, in and out of focus, and in that blur is an unsettled moment to this tableau.14 Like that glossed image, Herbert and Walter personified opposing approaches to the muddle, at the turn of the century, of colonial intrusion. Despite their neat delineation, both are mired in the same class privileging (the Times obituary called Herbert a master of “entente cordiale,” a family trait which no doubt Walter shared, finely cultivated over generations). Should Walter’s empathy for the plight of the lowly, then, be perceived cautiously within the context of powerful class expectations? Can and should we read his work on the earthy rhymes of annancy simply as a way of asserting, however subtly, an imperial dictum for a more sophisticated beast? Both Herbert and Walter, as a reflection of sibling revolt against motherland, are resolute in resolving England’s colonial predicament: One way was to mask colonialism’s intrusions; the other, to document a way of life brought about, and then threatened, by those same interventions. It was all very disturbing. In choosing the aesthetics of the countryside,Walter Jekyll stepped lightly into the open semeosis of that veneered finish of Herbert’s panoptic. It was a bold and courageous move for someone so self-consciously English with much

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to lose in the gamble.The Jamaican recluse was in his midfifties when he decided to untangle those nagging prejudices, with McKay’s assistance. (Coincidentally, this dilemma gets resolved in the perfection of a writing style by the poet that merges English and Caribbean sensibilities.) Together, mentor and pupil read Shopenhauer, Shakespeare, and Goethe against the annancy trickster-spider tales that had been popular among peasants in Africa and Jamaica and were now of interest to English, U.S., and commonwealth readers. Both cultivated an ear for Italian libretto that made the jammas and shay-shays of the Jamaican hills resonate, it seemed, with even more meaning, as the fine overlays were accentuated in the transition from one to the other. It was an interesting and exciting synthesis, and Jekyll’s many moods—rebel, bohemian, gardener, and blasphemer—seemed only to aid the young poet in claiming his persona and métier. Soon McKay would adopt many of his mentor’s quirks, which he identified with high culture and good taste, as tools of his craft. He mastered the language of the ethnographer and cottage gardener, adopted their perspectives, and so was able to attain some degree of popularity among the upper middle class in England. He also assumed the mantle of English contrariness that he carefully observed in Olivier and Jekyll as a mark of learnedness and independence. Still, the poet was sometimes taken aback by the bitterness in Jekyll’s pronouncements. “The only thing I never liked in him,” remarked McKay later, “was his always saying that England and Empire were going to the dogs.” Jekyll seemed determined to correct past wrongs and was motivated to do so, oddly, because “his class had abdicated the right to rule,” McKay explained,“in favour of unscrupulous middle class politicians.”15 (When the poet traveled to England in 1920 to complete work on a chapbook, Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems, he selected for his editor and mentor C. K. Ogden, who possessed the same quirks, the markings, so McKay believed, of high culture and a rigorous intellect.) Indeed,Walter was a unique specimen for someone, like McKay, hoping to master English literary traditions. Born in 1849, the youngest of six children,Walter was closest in age and temperament to his sister Gertrude—the famous artist, textile worker, and horticulturist—and the least favored by his father. Such paternal disapproval may have been the spark for his iconoclasm and rebellion. By the age of seventeen, he was not “easily forced into standard moulds,” he realized, which marked the beginning, as everyone in the tight-knit community of Surrey surmised, of a slow precipitous slide toward rootlessness—his “plight,” as his older sister Caroline remarked, of not “fitting the pattern prescribed by his family.”16 He eventually attended Trinity College, after which, in 1874, he became ordained as a minister in the Anglican Church. Gertrude, the unwed renegade artist in the family (and there was concern here as well), became a powerful role model, and brother and sister vacationed together, alone and in the company of

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artists. He so admired her that he began writing poems and ditties that ended torturously: Her brother follows in her train In spite of mud, wet grass and rain. They ask for algebra in vain, of Oubit.17 Through Gertrude,Walter met Hercules Brabazon, who had a reputation for grooming rebellious young men and mentoring them.Would he guide Walter as well? Although Gertrude chaperoned her younger brother to Chalet de Sonzier, at Lake Geneva, to visit Brabazon, where they “sketched, gardened and walked in flowery meadows before settling to evenings of improvised music and drama,” it was hard for Walter, especially as one treated as the runt of the family, to resist Brabazon’s paternal pull.18 The relationship with Brabazon was Walter Jekyll’s introduction to homosexual desire.19 Ultimately, Jamaica was a refuge for Jekyll, prompted by an increasingly rigid intolerance of homosexuality, particularly toward the clergy, among his own class and family.This was, after all, the height of Oscar Wilde’s notoriety as a cause célèbre, and an entire generation of young men and women descended into a subculture of decadence and ennui. Jekyll was not the first to escape persecution by traveling across the Atlantic. (Among those sexual rebels, the term of use was “hedonism,” and Sydney Olivier possessed a bit of it as well.) But in moving to Jamaica in 1895, the sexually rebellious Jekyll also retired as an Anglican minister. The role would be useless here, he felt, among those who already knew the way to salvation. In 1904, he published the vitriolic Bible Untrustworthy, which renounced Western religions and severed his one real English commitment. Henceforth he would perambulate among the lowly. It seemed to him that Buddhism and the tropics were a better path toward individual salvation.Yet like many ideas that traveled from the motherland to her unyielding offspring, this one adapted to and rebelled against that idyllic tableau of the countryside. The Bible Untrustworthy, Jekyll’s personal manifesto of revolt, marked his entry into the vernacular and became his spiritual journey from high operatic and classical art forms of England, Italy, and Switzerland to African and Jamaican folktales, Buddhism, and vegetarianism. High and low merged in the foothills of Jamaica. He explained: “I always identified myself with the lost. How could I hope to escape damnation—for I understood the parable but too well—when it was only the few that were saved? . . . I was the rich man—did I not belong to that well-to-do class of which it is said, How hardly shall a rich man enter into the kingdom of heaven?”20 Although McKay knew of the trickster of annancy lore, to read the comments and stories in Jekyll’s drafts and logs for Annancy Stories, Digging Sings,

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Ring Tunes, and Dancing would be powerful incentive to reinvent, appropriate, and revitalize his own lyrical melodies. It also confirmed for him that the popular form of expression, the ephemeral vernacular, was the surest route to England’s heart, and consequently to her soul and beauty. It is in the art of annancy, Walter Jekyll had pointed out to the young poet, that one becomes “an accomplished actor,” able to “assume any character.” In Jamaican Song and Story, the folkloric, annancy, and horticultural traditions would be hobbled together in unique ways. Annancy comes from the Asante and is an African village hero who survives by cunning and shape shifting.21 In Jamaica, annancy takes on the texture of the slave culture (including abolitionists as well as planters in a discourse sheared by the Middle Passage and plantation life) and is imbued with the craft of surviving. Consequently, it relies on the power and meaning of words, and the cultural gaps and hesitancies between destination and location help in the unraveling of control. If African slaves themselves could not triumph over “bukra massa,” the white man, at least their imagination, in creating annancy, would. The critic Michael North has pointed out that McKay’s “dialect, tea meetings, perhaps, even obeah and sex, become beautiful only when touched by the wand of English approval”—and this wand was found in Jekyll’s interest in folk culture, dialect, and annancy, a way around empire and a journey into a more lyrical countryside.22 Dialect—which may be an interesting and novel way to view the syntactic cover of annancy—also united English aristocracy and exploited peasantry against the “pinching middle class” and the steady progression of modernity, a world of middling civil servants and watered-down Kiplingism.23 McKay identified with the refined aesthetics of those upper-class rebels, who reminded him, in his own vivid imagination, of the glory days of “King Rum and Sugar” when major dukes and lords were called out to dispense culture.24 Jekyll’s rejection of Englishness might well be founded upon this distaste, which he shared with McKay, for the modern middle class, whose material wealth and social standing rose in relation to the destruction of that very countryside, now in the colonies, of simple time-honored values. Such was the oppression and sense of injustice that united peasant and gentry. McKay’s “Quashie to Buccra,” published in 1912, conveys this annancy overlay and is aimed at readers “who would associate dialect with happy-golucky peasants,” where “obfuscation and indirection of the annancy role” is viewed innocently as “childish play-acting.”25 Quashie is the master of “the congo-saw,” or double-talk—the “smiling mask” that Henry Louis Gates has masterfully described as the “signifying monkey” in his book by that title. McKay, though, seems to see himself as the personification of annancy in temperament and verse, and this complexity has led some critics to consider the poems in Songs of Jamaica as simply “the fight to get Annancy back.”26 Annancy

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is woven as a subtle conceit, working at many levels and frequencies, since the poet hardly felt the need to “claim” annancy or “resist” Englishness. It seems to me that Jekyll, in contrast, was the more subversive or at least assertive, encouraging McKay to write “in any rhythm” that came naturally. This, for Jekyll, was the way into the vernacular. It was not about the fight to get annancy back, but a way to reinvigorate literature, ultimately a sublime reordering of that old English heaven. Consequently, dialect was more than just “childish play-acting”; it confronted “English directly, culture to culture,” and offered intellectuals such as Olivier, Jekyll, and McKay a route to cultural recovery. As used by McKay and more modernist practitioners, it also resisted, confused, and even parodied high artistic expression and imperialism.27 But for McKay, a mere teenager saturated by Jekyll’s omniscient scrutiny, dialect left a bitter reminder of his own unsteady place in English literature.And there would be a few more years “in between” before he would successfully work dialect into his modern verse. JAMAICAN SONG AND STORY: Annancy Stories, Digging Sings, Ring Tunes, and Dancing Tunes lays the groundwork for a tradition, regardless of the class privileges that went into its making. It was about the oral and folkloric stories that up to now had gone unrecorded. Jekyll’s research took him into the villages and hamlets of the Jamaican countryside, where he kept his ears open for younger lyrical voices. Jekyll found McKay in Brown Town, apprenticing as a wheelwright, preparing for a career as village artisan that seemed a doomed certainty.Yet McKay carried his poems with him everywhere in anticipation of just such a wand of approval as Jekyll’s. It just happened to occur at this convergence of the country and the colonies, produced by that ripple in the veil—between the old order in crisis, denoted by Jekyll, and the modern efficiency of Olivier’s cut. “You can’t image what it meant,” McKay commented of Jekyll,“to meet such a man like that.”28 When he read McKay’s verse, Jekyll exclaimed:“The Jamaican dialect has never been put into literary form, except in my Annancy stories. Now is your chance as a native boy [to] put the Jamaican dialect into literary language.”29 For an unyielding offspring like McKay, “thirsting for knowledge,” Jekyll would be extremely useful for mastering the lexicon needed to translate an exotic island sensibility into a “literary language” that would interest readers around the world.30 Jekyll would do more, and even help find a publisher for Songs of Jamaica.31 The horticulturist and ethnographer, nearing sixty, was a grandfather to McKay’s blossoming adolescence.There were homoerotic nuances (shaped by Jekyll’s encounter with Hercules Brabazon at Lake Geneva), but McKay makes clear, in later comments, that he was never patronized as were writers during the Harlem Renaissance in a way that made artistic expression into supine submission. Their “special” relationship, as Jekyll called it, was viewed as a

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unique mark of their Englishness and their own brand of high culture (decadence, for instance, as well as horticulture and the vernacular). Jekyll understood, from his close relationship with Gertrude in the field of decorative arts, that homosexual bonding was to be encouraged as an expression of uniqueness. For both Jekyll and McKay, it was a discreet relationship that seemed a marriage of convenience held together by a shared rebelliousness against the status quo—the poet would also have his own rebellions against the black elite in Jamaica and the United States—and a shared love of languages. (McKay would see his later relationships through this rebellious sexuality, especially with Ogden in London, as more symbiotic, in contrast to his experience in the United States with Max Eastman, which was less sexual than predatory.) Critics like Rhonda Cobham, however, seem to persist in painting Jekyll, possibly because of who he was, as “firmly ensconced in his aristocratic notions of class and racial hierarchy” and as a less than enthusiastic partner in a relationship that would refuse to name, as she puts it, “its homoerotic possibilities.”Yet, as Sydney Olivier also discovered, the expatriate Jekyll “shunned the philistine society of the Jamaican social elite” and seemed quite relaxed in his own social and sexual eccentricities, which increasingly included McKay’s poetic ambitions.32 Walter Jekyll was described as “a highly intelligent, restless, complex character out of step with the modern world.” In 1916, for instance, he wrote to a friend that he was using a fountain pen for the first time, and that he had never been in a motorcar or an airplane or seen a cinema. He lived “puritanically in the Jamaican countryside, sharing his scholarship with the local people.”33 When Jekyll visited Clarendon Hills,“a few hundred villages widely scattered over the hills,” his reputation as a folklorist preceded him. By now, he was known as “this man who had gone among the peasants and collected their field-and-yard songs (words and music) and African folk tales.”34 At first, McKay was a blur, seen “merely as a literate phenomenon among the illiterate peasants whose songs and tales he was writing.” Soon, however, Jekyll appreciated him as “the articulate consciousness of the peasants,” and those crude experiments in dialect verse became, for Jekyll, real lyrics. Early reviews of Songs of Jamaica, McKay’s first book of poems, made note of those qualities. He was definitely a “new poet”—not just of Jamaica, but of the commonwealth. His “songs” (as the poems were called by Jekyll and others), described as “humorous” and “pathetic,” gave English readers insight into “the joys and sorrows of the peasant’s lot and the writer’s own humanitarian sympathies.” McKay was praised as the Robert Burns of Jamaica, a characterization that seems to have shadowed him throughout his life. But for some, such as Olivier and Jekyll, his writing was the literary hope of an exhausted British syntax.35 McKay reluctantly assumed the Burns persona but refashioned it into a Jamaican double-talker who parodied “Old England”: the hypocrisy of English

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progressives espousing a “New Theology” throughout the colonies. Over time, McKay would tackle other causes, such as Communism, which he believed to be out of touch with the desires of this modern condition of disenfranchisement and diaspora. This New Theology, for instance, was based upon Rationalism, which mirrored in the colonies the activities in England. (It had its own society and press.) Those who believed in the New Theology, such as Jekyll, whose own spiritual muse was a “higher criticism,” opposed established religious dogma.36 But what about this New Theology bothered McKay? Was it the break with Anglican tradition, or the softening of an English style of rule? Religion and its mysticism would be an important anchor later in the poet’s intellectual development. The associations with Robert Burns and Scottish dialect may all relate to McKay’s epigraph to “Rise and Fall,” which follows, a poem included in Songs of Jamaica that parodies the rustic panegyric tradition.There is a bit of understatement in McKay’s apology to Burns “for making him speak in Jamaican dialect.”Yet there is a sense of camaraderie across traditions, as well, and in appreciation McKay dedicates his verse to Burns. Dey read ’em again an’ again, n’ laugh an’ cry at ’em in turn; I felt I was getting’ quite vain, But dere was a lesson fe learn. My poverty quickly took wing, Of life no experience had I; I couldn’ then want anyt’ing Dat kindness or money could buy. Dey tek me away from me lan’, De gay o’ de wul’ to behold, An’ roam me t’rough palaces gran’, An show’red on me honour untold. I went to de ballroom at night, An’ danced wid de belles of de hour; Half dazed by de glitterin’ light, I lounged in de palm-covered bower. I flirted wid beautiful girls, An’ drank de wine flowin’ red; I felt my brain movin’ in whirls, An’ knew I was losin’ my head. But soon I was tired of it all, My spirit was weary to roam; De life grew as bitter as gall, I hungered again for my home.

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Te-day I am back in me lan’, Forgotten by all de gay throng, A poorer but far wiser man, An’ knowin’ de right from de wrong. For the poet, home becomes an aesthetic move. In fact, McKay may have always resisted the dialect impulse, viewing it as simply a cover for a more ethereal idyll. His determination to master it, however, goes back to that encounter in Brown Town when he first tried to show Jekyll his “serious” poems, written in what the poet called “straight English.”37 Jekyll found them repetitious. After mulling a bit, he pointed to the persona poems—the dialect verse written in Creole, such as “Cotch Donkey,” which was later published in Constab Ballads. He exclaimed, like an excited botanist in the bush:This is “the real thing.”38 At Jekyll’s urging, McKay reworked the poems as reportage on the culture and landscape of Jamaica, an exotic world that would be of interest to those in “Old England,” where dialect was seen as a titillating diversion from the mechanical and new, and a connection with the rustic past.This became a style that McKay later perfected and used as an interlocutor, moving in and out of persona.These “persona” poems, in dialect, were “not an easy task,” McKay later admitted:“The trouble was that only the West Indians could read the dialect and that quite badly too. Besides the masses were too poor to buy books. English people and coloured Americans were too lazy to take the trouble to read the dialect. And some of the lazy critics said some of the most silly things about that which they never tried to read and understand.”39 Dialect, in many ways, was simply too limited and at times confusing.The poet wanted “a fighting chance to write things” that could be easily understood. (He would develop his own internal rhyme later, in England, with Ogden.) But although this dialect was the native talk of the villages and to a lesser degree of the town, it was difficult to produce, a fact overlooked by English readers such as Jekyll, who viewed it as a natural form of expression. “I had to abide by certain rules of syntax and grammar in writing which are unnecessary in native talk,” McKay explained.Although he admitted in My Green Hills of Jamaica that dialect was “easier to write than poems in straight English,” he explained to Ogden later, in England,“I had the consolation of having done my share of helping to preserve the dialect in written form.” He concluded curtly:“I’ve buried it.”40 McKay had been educated to believe that London was the “metropolis” and a place one must experience as payback for the benefits of being one of empire’s lowly subjects. In his initiation into this world, his first teachers were English tutors, James Hill and then a Mr.Watts (who was associated with the Rationalist Society in Jamaica through Jekyll). At twelve, McKay studied with his brother, Uriah Theodore, who offered his Shakespeare collection (acquired

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from the Hathways, who were English missionaries) and gave him the opportunity to experience the “romance of science,” which he seemed not taken with, in such works as Thomas Henry Huxley’s Man’s Place in the Universe and the German philosopher Ernest Heinrich Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe— solid nineteenth-century works. McKay instead preferred works on empire, by Sir Harry Johnson, for instance. He also read popular women romance writers of the era, among them Mrs. Henry Wood, Charlotte M. Braeme, E.D.E.N. Southworth, and Marie Corelli. He devoured the Waverly novels, too,“my first reading of anything that was thrilling just for the thrill.”41 But the Romantics would be central—Shelley,William Hazlitt, John Bell, Leigh Hunt (who prefaced Shelley’s “Masque of Anarchy” after his untimely death), and later Katherine Bradley and William Ernest Henley, the decadents. But it was Charles Dickens’s view of the landscape and its workers that inspired the poet, and we see the English author’s imprint upon McKay in “Hard Times,” which follows here, a poem McKay wrote in 1909 about a poor peasant and that he included in Songs of Jamaica. His “first attempt” at this grand English tradition was, he remarked, “a little thing.” Even here, though, there is a keen desire to refashion those querulous English traditions: McKay blends and bends his field of vision, unlike more tradition-bound poets who write from one vantage point.42 His poetry engages in a discourse directly with those traditions, which sometimes gives it a didactic and instructive quality. De mo’ me wuk, de mo’ time hard, I don’t know what fe do; I ben’ me knee an’ pray to Ghad, Yet t’ings same as befo’. De taxes knockin’ at me door, I hear de bailiff ’s v’ice; Me wife is sick, can’t get no cure, But gnawin’ me like mice. De picknies hab to go to school Widout a bite fe taste; And I am working like a mule, While buccra sittin’ in de cool, Hab ’nuff nenyam fe waste. De clodes is tearin’ off dem back When money seems noa mek; A man can’t eben ketch a mac, Care how him ’train him neck. De peas won’t pop, de corn can’t grow, Poor people face look sad;

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Dat Gahd would cuss de lan’ I’d know, For black naygur too bad. I won’t gib up, I won’t say die, For all de time is hard; Aldough de wul’ soon en’, I’ll try My wutless best as time goes by, An’ trust on in my Gahd. McKay’s use of dialect conveys the seemingly unveiled thoughts and feelings of the working poor, and English readers became engaged vicariously as scrutinizing interlocutors in this romanticized struggle that is ultimately tied to the commonplaces of home and hearth. It is a kind of vernacular workbook, especially in poems like “Peasants’Ways o’Thinking,” offering up grievances and complaints from colonials and addressed to someone in authority—a paternal queen such as Victoria, for instance, or a rebellious governor like Olivier.43 The lightness in the cadence of this dialect verse, though, belies deeper, disturbing messages. And if one peels away this semantic cloak, one experiences the compressed anger and revolt that appear in “If We Must Die,” written in 1919 after the poet had been in the United States for nearly six years and acquired an American idiom. In fact, beyond the sing-song cadence of the language, which might indeed distract modern readers (though intrigue and delight its Victorian audience), this sturdy prototype that we see in “Hard Times” is actually more defiant. There is a sureness to “I won’t gib up, I won’t say die,” that is absent from “If We Must Die”—a more fatalistic rendering composed some twenty year later at the end of a demoralizing world war. It was ultimately horticulture, and not dialect, that had a lasting impact on McKay. And in Walter Jekyll’s personal and reflective diaries, which appeared in the Garden beginning in 1900, we begin to understand the sublime beauty and power of this intoxicating countryside that would arouse a Romantic fire in McKay’s verse. It wells up even in a cold-climed Englander—particularly around his cottage, which evoked memories of his childhood in Old Surrey— as well as in a peasant boy thirsting for fame. “A Garden in Jamaica,” the title of Jekyll’s regular column, mixed local native gossip and folk wisdom with the keen observation of an inveterate walker who loved the challenges of the steep Jamaican terrain. Sometimes Jekyll wrote with childlike wonder, and we feel the pull of the land as it tugs in one direction, then another, moving from Old Surrey to his cottage in Yallahs Valley outside Kingston.44 Such passion for one’s natural surroundings impressed the young McKay, who immersed himself in horticulture and the varied Jamaican flora. When McKay read those diaries or listened to Jekyll read them aloud, the experience

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gave him a profound sense of rootedness; it also sharpened his poetic imagery. Because of Jekyll’s persistence, much of McKay’s poetic meaning is about or developed through nature, even in poems that seem racial. With nature, McKay explored his colonial identity, as well as feelings of alienation, love, and loneliness. A command of nature was a mark of a creative mind, he believed, no doubt a prejudice he acquired from his mentor.45 McKay took his training as a nature poet seriously and believed it was a subject every literary-minded Victorian should know thoroughly. Over the years, as his relationship with Jekyll and Olivier matured, McKay was able to delineate a style that used horticulture in such a way that it also expressed hybridity and the colonial condition. (And it is not so unusual to hear echoes of Olivier and Jekyll in some of McKay’s verse—nor does it take away from the poet’s own colonial presence.) In the literature of the Caribbean, as it evolved throughout the early twentieth century, this aesthetic becomes theorized as a poetics alternately of location and dislocation in the works of Edouard Glissant and others.46 After more than a year in Jamaica, Jekyll reminded Garden readers in England in a journal entry published on a chilly March day in 1901 that “here winter is but a name.” He continued, enticingly: “The temperature ranges for the most part between 70 and 80. At this elevation (2,000 feet) no house has a fireplace, and we live day and night with open windows.” Jekyll had other intentions, instead of shocking English readers who cherished the integrity of the hearth:“I now propose to write of just those things which are peculiar to special times,” such as the “exceeding great glory of the Poinsettia—‘six months green and six months red,’ as the saying runs,” of particular interest to Westerners because of its “gorgeous double” bloom during Christmas.47 Jekyll used the image of the poinsettia, as had McKay, to symbolize colonial migrations, and it becomes for both a source for that elusive “real thing” that English adventurers—and horticulturists—quested for. In his garden diary, Jekyll explained that the poinsettia’s origins have been tangled “in obscurity” and it is “unknown in England.” Most astonishingly, upon leaving Jamaica, the plant suddenly, inexplicably appears to revert to its ordinary form. “In Jamaica, the superiority of the double kind is incontestable. A young plant bearing a few sprays is a striking object, but the brilliancy of a natural specimen carrying scores of them is such that it dims the splendour of even the brightest of its neighbors.”48 In point of fact, the poinsettia was originally from Mexico, an import as were most specimens in the Caribbean, since the English ingeniously introduced varieties as forests were cleared for plantations.This was part of the general horticultural masking proposed by Herbert Jekyll that included taking bits and pieces back to the metropolis, as well, as the empire convulsed.To further complicate its geography, the tropical plant was named for a North American, a U.S. ambassador named Joel Pionsett.49

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Horticulture, as Jamaica Kincaid and other Caribbean writers have pointed out, is a powerful reminder of the colonizing experience.50 Its importance in terms of adaptive artistic expression, however, especially in places like Jamaica where annancy is a cultured outgrowth of that unstated tension between ruler and ruled, is sometimes overlooked for the more obvious incursions of colonialism.When Jekyll reacts to McKay’s “songs,” for instance, it is with the horticultural eye of a botanist who sees the uniqueness of a “double poinsettia.” His urgency in seizing the moment, in both studying the poinsettia and promoting McKay’s verse, lies in the cruel reality that this magnificent “natural splendour” can wither and die at a mere whim or change of geography. The message, for Jekyll, was clear. Together, poet and teacher imagined creative expression as a fragile symbiosis: Jekyll viewed McKay in terms of hardiness, while the poet imagined his poetic experiments as hedonistic crossfertilization. (We can appreciate Jekyll’s fears when McKay announced his going off to the United States in 1911.Would his “natural splendour” wither as well?) Temperamentally, Jekyll’s rare island bloom—and the power of that message—was dependent on locale. Its fickle existence, especially in the turbulence of a modern age, was ephemeral and unattainable. McKay, as an internationalist in training, would contest that idea and strive instead to create poetic “blossoms” that resisted the very taxonomy that brought his verse into being. (He boasted later of his own intellectual development in horticultural terms as well; he considered himself a rare flower among weeds, he explained to Ogden.) This emphasis on locale is central to a poem like “Spanish Needle,” which exemplifies the use of horticulture to express a complicated diaspora such as McKay envisioned.51 The poem, which follows, was written in 1920 when McKay lived in London. (Most of the early poems were revised in England. And even here, we can see the sway of horticulture as still holding promise as a type of cultural discourse. But there were obvious limitations to that transaction, particularly in this period of internationalism and world war. Nevertheless, in these reworkings, McKay sought to reimagine—in effect, broaden—the very conventions that enabled him access to readers in an earlier, more countrified era.“Spanish Needle” speaks to that dilemma, in which the poet redefines his identity and role in English society along a more global continuum during a time of postwar irruptions.) Known as “burr marigolds” or “sticktight,” Spanish needles are associated with the popular Asteraceae (asters), and produce a two-pronged burrlike fruit (achenes) along with yellow flowers. It is a common plant in the Caribbean, and one immediately thinks of Whitman’s ubiquitous and resilient leaves of grass, which he used to characterize a tough, straight-talking new race. (One can visualize this relationally: grass being to U.S. democracy what Spanish needles are to hybridity.)

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Lovely dainty Spanish needle With your yellow flower and white, Dew-bedecked and softly sleeping, Do you think of me tonight? Shadowed by the spreading mango, Nodding by the rippling stream, Tell me, dear plant of my childhood, Do you of the exile dream? Do you see me by the brookside, Catching crabs beneath the stone? As you did the day you whispered: Leave the harmless dears alone? Do you see me in the meadow, Coming from the woodland spring, With a bamboo on my shoulder And a pail slung from a string? Do you see me all expectant, Lying in an orange grove, While the swee-swees sing above me, Waiting for my elf-eyed love? Lovely dainty Spanish needle, Source to me of sweet delight, In your far-off sunny southland Do you dream of me to-night? Both plant and person are in a struggle for identity, however unformed, as they migrate and adapt. (While Whitman’s race is shaped essentially in rootedness, McKay finds self-expression in migration.) This contrasts with Herbert’s static hedges and mowed lawns, which are, as Kincaid notes, too much like a very “bad painting.”52 But a revitalized diaspora also underlies the poet’s metaphoric uses of plant taxonomy, where he sees his lowly plant in Jamaica as having a more significant drama abroad: “Do you of the exile dream?” the poet asks, as if to a long-lost lover. (McKay also does an interesting variation of this love-object inversion in the reworking of “Sukee River.”) Spanish needles are indeed resilient and resemble colonials in their adaptation in North America and elsewhere. For the poet, they symbolize durability but also an ongoing condition of dislocation, much like Stuart Hall’s ever-present becoming. In “Tropics in New York,” fruit becomes the medium that evokes the poet’s own estrangement. (McKay traveled to the United States in 1911 on a United Fruit Company passenger-cargo vessel, and the poem, as well as McKay’s move into U.S. culture, is filled with fatalism and dread, loss of

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identity and annihilation.) As he gazes into a New York shop window where the fruit is displayed and sees a blurred palimpsest, we are returned to Herbert’s centripetal drawing-room vision. Like the old woman in “The Biter Bit,” the poet places himself in that Jekyll frame, but it is a wraithlike image, distorted by the transparency of the windowpane.53 In the poem, “the particular language of the colony”—one’s relationship to nature, in fact—comes up against what North calls “the generalized language of empire”: “There is a special irony in the situation of the transplanted Jamaican staring at the fruit imported from his homeland and carefully displayed behind glass. What was common at home, and commonly available, becomes a rare delicacy, not the recipient of prizes but the prize itself.” 54 For McKay, produce and person are interchangeable parts of a world economy, much as Jekyll’s double poinsettias are traded and then discarded after their utility and novelty are spent:“The cargo” is assimilated as an “exotic treat,” and the passenger is soon “cut off from both tropics and New York.”55 What, one wonders, are the “old familiar ways,” in this and other poems, that McKay hungers for as he gazes onto the doubleness of the shop window? Is it a “rude awakening,” as we discovered in the poem “A Dream,” where the colonial confronts his past as well as the (now) diasporic present? Does McKay’s acquired “Englishness” add to the complexity and range of feelings as he catalogues the material culture of the United States, where his sense of place is routed along dissonance and alien racial encounters? Against this ambiguity and creeping cosmopolitanism,Walter Jekyll reassured his English readers in the preface to McKay’s 1912 Songs of Jamaica, one could always trust the peasant’s heart, which is tempered in “the depths of the country.” McKay’s poetic virtue is that of a hardy, rare specimen whose spirit would always beat an aesthetically pleasing double blossom: “Readers of this volume will be interested to know that they here have the thoughts and feelings of a Jamaican peasant of pure black blood.The young poet, aged twentytwo, spent his early years in the depths of the country, and though he has now moved to the more populous neighbourhood of Kingston, his heart remains in his Clarendon hills.”56 It is this same depth that motivated intellectuals such as Gertrude Jekyll in England to view the vernacular as a popular uprising against the tide of cheap material culture. But others, such as MacDermot in Jamaica, were convinced of McKay’s durability as well. In an article that praised McKay’s craft, MacDermot noted: “Change he must in some things, still I feel pretty confident that the inner man of native modesty and simple beauty is going to defy the world’s coarse finger and thumb.”57 McKay’s rootedness would endure as he traveled and interacted with others—in his rich imagination. That “inner man” and “native modesty,” which were cultivated with Jekyll’s help, would become an aesthetic stance. In his search for some angle of discourse to

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understand Englishness, McKay would also refine how diaspora would be articulated beyond and over race. Consequently, those Garden journal entries became McKay’s portal into the psyche of the English gentry—their fantasies, neuroses, and desires. How might the poet untangle those concerns to make them useful for his own poetic identity? In the poem “Flame-Heart,” for instance, another written on his “return” to England and later included in Spring in New Hampshire, McKay takes Jekyll’s focus on the poinsettia and reshapes it into a subtle reminder of home. In McKay’s poem, which follows, the poinsettia also evokes feelings of uneasiness that years of living in the United States and England had brought. Where is the poet’s heart after ten years in another land? Has he become insensitive to the plant’s natural splendor or lost touch with his locale? The uneasiness is the loss of identity—so wrapped up, in this natural, idyllic world of fantasy and illusions, between paradise, cosmopolitanism, and his own place in literature. So much I have forgotten in ten years, So much in ten brief years! I have forgot What time the purple apples come to juice, And what month brings the shy forget-me-not. I have forgot the special, startling season Of the pimento’s flowering and fruiting; What time of year the ground doves brown the fields And fill the noonday with their curious fluting. I have forgotten much, but still remember The poinsettia’s red, blood-red, in warm December. Abruptly, the poem shifts to Jamaica: I still recall the honey-fever grass, But cannot recollect the high days when We rooted them out of the ping-wing path To stop the mad bees in the rabbit pen. I often try to think in what sweet month The languid painted ladies used to dapple The yellow by-road mazing from the main, Sweet with the golden threads of the rose-apple. I have forgotten—strange—but quite remember The poinsettia’s red, blood-red, in warm December. While fearing that his native “heart” will be lost amid the cold climate of the North, the poet’s sudden encounter with the poinsettia on a gritty city street jars his grounding; bringing with it an array of aromas, sights, and sounds, it revives him.The plant also becomes the fatalistic trigger for a range

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of emotions conjured up along with the bad taste of dialect. But that image also holds Jekyll, and those feelings too have been dulled. Is his uneasiness, then, one of homosexual desire—or panic? In terms of a diasporic register, McKay’s view of the poinsettia works off Jekyll’s impression, whose English frame sees just “a catalogue of names of plants in flower” that would “hardly change from January to December.”This bloom, for Jekyll,“is the one brilliant spot of colour in a landscape of quiet green. I always rejoice in the lucky chance which placed it so happily.” And this, too, curiously stirs the horticulturist in McKay.58 These poems seem hardly to distinguish between plants, fruits, and colonial migrants; all travel the same taxonomic routes of dislocation and rupture. From 1907 to 1912, McKay visited Jekyll frequently and excitedly passed along his latest rhymes on peasant life, which Jekyll immediately edited and annotated. More importantly, McKay was invited into the horticulturist’s private world, where he discovered in Jekyll’s library the richness of the poetic form on the page.There were Childe Harold, The Dunciad, Essay on Man, Paradise Lost, Elizabethan lyrics, Leaves of Grass, the lyrics of Shelley and Keats, and late-Victorian poets such as William Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. McKay also read the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, who was published by the Rationalist Press of London in six-penny reprints, and works by George Eliot (the infatuation with Eliot, McKay surmised, may have been due to Jekyll’s close relationship with the family in England).There were also the books and articles Jekyll himself wrote, such as the Garden pieces and the blasphemous Bible Untrustworthy. With these in his lap and imagination, McKay was indeed in a transplanted English paradise. (This idyllic moment, continually sought, was briefly attained in Tangier in the 1930s, when McKay immersed himself in the Arab folkways of North Africa and mentored young peasant poets. In that sense, his diasporic cycle would be complete.) Jekyll had an ear for languages—German, Latin, Italian, French—and translated Schopenhauer and Spinoza, as well as Dante, Leopardi, Goethe,Villon, and Baudelaire. He recited in German and French, Latin and Italian, and simultaneously translated and read when the whim took him. McKay paid tribute to his mentor in the poem “The Hermit,” which follows. Set at Jekyll’s lofty mountain cottage (later destroyed by one of the frequent earthquakes), McKay’s lyrics bring to mind William Wordsworth’s “Ruined Cottage” or the forlorn hermitage in Samuel Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Still, from this hermitage, the poet writes, is a clear view of “de wul’.” Indeed, the perspective was breathtaking. Far in de country let me hide myself From life’s sad pleasures an’ de greed of self,

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Dwellin’ wid Nature primitive an’ rude, Livin’ a peaceful life of solitude. Dere by de woodland let me build my home Where tropic roses ever are in bloom, An’ t’rough de wild cane growin’ thick and tall Rushes in gleeful mood de waterfall. Roof trong enough to keep out season rain, Under whose eaves loved swallows will be fain To build deir nests, an deir young birdlings rear Widouten have de least lee t’ought of fear. An’ in my study I shall view de wul’, An’ learn of all its doin’s to de full’ List to de woodland creatures’ music sweet— Sad, yet contented in my lonely retreat. There is the Romantic cadence of a sadder but wiser mariner, and we sense, in McKay’s verse, a fondness for his mentor’s colonial isolation. Jekyll remarked in a Gleaner article: “It is the fashion to dwell on the pleasures of youth, and reference is seldom made to its disappointments, yet they are what chiefly live in my memory.”59 This unattainable childhood—one McKay partly imagined in Surrey as a result of his encounter with Jekyll—would stay with the Jamaican poet as he traveled farther from this secure island idyll. But the way to Jekyll’s view of “de wul’ ” was treacherous, much like the way to Olivier’s retreat.60 The cottage was at the entrance to a defile, or gorge, two thousand feet above sea level. (By the time McKay visited, it was partly in ruins, and so had the ramshackle look, in McKay’s imagination, of Wordsworth’s cottage.) On the easterly side, Jekyll wrote for a 1900 Garden article,“a narrow strip of garden edges a precipice which falls to the busy, rushing, roaring little river 200 feet below.” From the house,“the ground falls in three directions and rises steeply on the fourth.”The westerly side gave the impression of “the possibility of a path” that was “roughly paved” to withstand the wash of rain. “It is difficult to convey an idea of the steepness of the land to anyone unacquainted with the country. Perhaps some notion may be afforded by the fact that, though it is quite a short walk from the top of the garden to the bottom, the descent in perpendicular height exceeds 150 feet.”61 “The Hermit” may be one of those “serious poems” that Jekyll found too disturbingly tradition bound.When it was published, Jekyll made no reference to Wordsworth and instead added annotations on the climate, native folkways, and plant life. Jekyll was neither a literary critic, like Max Eastman, McKay’s U.S. editor, nor a poet, like Olivier. He read lyrics, it seemed, for the richness of language, not for symbolism. He was, as McKay later wrote, a practical scholar, who offered his protégé a “new world in literature.” In his day-to-day

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activities—gardening, walking, and doing some writing and agriculture— Jekyll found harmony and balance, despite the myth of his “lonely self-exile,” as a vegetarian and Buddhist.62 In a way, Jekyll taught McKay the virtues as well as the limitations of such a lifestyle. (Years later, in Marseilles and Tangier, McKay found some satisfaction in his ability to earn a livelihood as a writer by living, as Jekyll had done, frugally and in harmony with nature.) McKay’s family and relatives were farmers and had become quite prosperous (his brother, Uriah Theodore, a teacher, brokered in bananas), and Claude was expected to follow in that line—or at least pursue a trade.63 But his temperament resisted the regularity of manual labor, and, after he met Jekyll, he moved to Kingston, where he joined the police force. In an interview published in 1911, McKay described as a “pitiable love story” the “underlying cause” for his enlisting.And the reason for his leaving may have been an untidy passion for a fellow cadet—or the possibility of a scandal once it became known. “I cannot touch the audience with my heart. It would be of no interest to them.”64 (McKay admitted later that the love poems in Constab Ballads were “sort of made up” and differed from the “real spontaneous singing” in Songs of Jamaica.)65 What is remarkable is that the poems were uncensored, particularly since they were about a homosexual relationship between two cadets in the pay of the British Empire.66 Still, the freedom Kingston offered, with its proximity to Olivier and Jekyll, and its relationship to London and beyond, seemed more enticing to McKay than service to country. In less than six months, his desire for the discipline of the policeman’s life soured and he pleaded with Jekyll to put an end to his time as a recruit:“it was one of the few things that I ever did that I profoundly regretted,” he remarked.67 But Jekyll saw the value in McKay’s literary output as a result of the experience and offered to pay for printing Constab Ballads, which McKay agreed to, though reluctantly. Songs of Jamaica, however, garnered all the praise, and reviews throughout the colonies were favorable. There were heated debates over the implications of McKay’s verse in Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin, and Cardiff, Melbourne, Sydney, and Auckland, Sierra Leone, Lagos, and Capetown, South Africa, and his verse was taken up as a new colonial sensibility.68 Kingston’s daily newspaper, the Gleaner, boasted that “we have genuine poetry here,” as if striking a diamond vein in Basutoland. The poet offered “a rhyming glimpse into an unknown world” in the “quaint vernacular of the negroes.” One reviewer, W.A. Stevenson, set the tone for all subsequent reviews—in England and elsewhere—by characterizing McKay as “an infant prodigy” and “a marvel” who attracted large audiences whenever he appeared in the country. (This would be a precursor to making that voyage in, as Said might say, to a more fantastic metropolis, London, and navigating around the craft of literary English.) Stevenson considered McKay at his best, however, in his “delicate love songs.”

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(Max Eastman and Frank Harris later discouraged him from writing this kind of poetry.) Walter Jekyll, of course, agreed with Stevenson’s assessment: The “love songs,” he nodded approvingly, were “charming in their simplicity.”69 Still, the masquerade as a colonial officer and the pageantry of wearing “de red seam”—the marking of the colonial policeman’s uniform—intrigued McKay, and it was an excellent prop and cover for his writings across a socially determined identity of race and place. (He later became a master of disguises— radical, decadent, North African fallah, communist, vagabond.) There was also some satisfaction in having the “opportunity of studying the type of mind that exists solely to make trouble for others.” It enabled him, as he put it, to “estimate and understand the same type among different peoples”—an asset for an author who would later police the poetic and social borderlands of a receding British presence.70 But it is Constab Ballads, where many of those “veiled” poems appear, that explores another side to this ornamental allure: hybridity.The poems touch on that fine line in annancy between appearance and intention—in this case, the English traditions against a Creole vernacular. Ironically, McKay’s wearing the “red seam” of authority, for which he was despised by the peasant folk, provided the cover to write about his own desires. (This need in the poet to satisfy his artistic integrity seemed to always trump calls for group unity, whether political or racial.) “To Bennie,” who is first introduced in Songs of Jamaica as a “dearest comrade” whose friendship McKay will never sever, is more fully realized in Constab Ballads. McKay writes of his lover: Dearly I love you, shall love you for ever; Moment by moment my thoughts are of you, Trust me, oh, trust me, for aye to be true.71 The poet comforts his “little comrade” after another officer throws a corrosive fluid in his face—a grim reminder of his social violations—and advises: “Of de pain o’ dis ya wul’ / We must suck we bellyful.” In “Bennie’s Departure,” lines from which follow, those “sad, glad” recollections of their time together bring “a strange thrill to my soul.” Although McKay used “an acceptably heterosexed convention,” as one critic put it—“the recognizably Kiplingesque jaunty, homosocial esprit de corps diction and cadence”—in cloaking the deeper implications of the poem, it is clear who the object of desire is.72 In de evenin’ we went walkin’, An’ de sweet sound of his voice, As we laughed or kept a-talkin’, Made my lovin’ heart rejoice: Full of happiness we strolled on,

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In de closin’ evenin’ light, Where de stately Cobre rolled on Gurglin’, murmrin’ in de night. The “red seam” is McKay’s ultimate alienation, yet he revels in its cloakedness, which allows him the freedom to write. (This universality of expression, beyond the mask of how one is perceived, gets grounded in theory later in London.) When, as a cadet, McKay dwells upon Sukee River, it brings him back to a childhood and a way of life he can never return to. Rivers are also important sexual markers for McKay and evoke feelings of childhood innocence, as they did for Jekyll. Bennie is “de little sunshine ‘o my life,” and now that he is gone, the poet turns to a life of “black stife.” Now all is blackness t’rough night an t’rough day, For my heart’s weary now Bennie’s away. The importance of the homosexual relationship with Bennie, within the context of McKay’s position as a recruit in English empire building, is that it challenges the binary upon which colonial success rested, whether male/female, peasant/English, or white/black. This had significance for McKay beyond a mere island “resistance” and was later refashioned into a political articulation of internationalism and a critique of the accepted rhetoric of selfdetermination. (In his inimitable style, McKay might ask, mischievously, self-determination for whom?) In another poem included in Constab Ballads, he writes: Where’er I roam.Whate’er the clime, I’ll never know a happier time; I seemed as happy as could be, When—everything was torn from me. De fateful day I ‘member still, De final breakin’ o’ my will, Again de sayin’ o’ good-bye, My poor heart’s silent wailin’ cry; My life, my soul, my all be’n gone, And ever since I am alone. Rudyard Kipling first “urged on the hunt of Anglo-Saxon imperialism with lyrical exhortation,” Olivier explained, and soon that mission had enchanted Americans as well, filling the empiric void in the years that followed England’s exhausted collapse. It was a hunt, however, based on a perverted notion of compulsory labor, military service, and penal taxation as the colonial condition.73 Olivier, Jekyll, and McKay pricked at that Kipling myth in their own individual styles. As the antithesis to empire, McKay urged on another

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kind of hunt. It was barbaric, as Olivier had noted, how this state of affairs had “militarized” the peasants, who in the process had become quite convinced, as their masters were, of the “higher worth” of guns and bullets. Constab Ballads is McKay’s attempt to put the colonial world in proper order with a better perspective—by turning it on its side and back, aesthetically and sexually. (Like Olivier, he understood the benefits as well as the limits of that fastidious ornamental gloss.) With his experiences as a constabulary officer, he became sensitized to neocolonial collaborators who, like himself, briefly wore “de red seam” of imperialism. He knew, at that early age, the seduction and abuse of power, an understanding reflected in these lines from another of the collection’s poems,“The Heart of a Constab”: Oh! What have I gained from my too, too rash act O’ joinin’ a hard Constab Force, Save quenchin’ my thirst from a vinegar cup, De vinegar cup o’ remorse?74 McKay was able to see the mistake and quickly learn from it.And so it was important, he and Jekyll reasoned, that readers understand the thoughts and feelings of a poet constable, whose existence, like the colonial’s, was real, in love and out, and sometimes an act of powerful poetic feeling where “imagination outruns discretion.”75

C hap te r 4

A Garden for All Reasons You cannot invent a new hat, you can only invent absurdities. —Gertrude Jekyll

In 1904, while Walter Jekyll was still researching his annancy tales, his sister Gertrude Jekyll published Old West Surrey: Some Notes and Memories. It was a chronicle of the pastoral world of West Surrey, a tiny hamlet on the outskirts of London. The book made note of English cottage gardening, a “precious heritage” that was threatened in the early modernist period of the twentieth century.“It is sad to think,” Gertrude Jekyll remarked, “that, within a few years, death will have claimed the few yet living of the old people who retain the speech and manner of the earlier part of the nineteenth century.” Born and brought up in those remote and quiet villages, she explained, many of them can neither read nor write,“and I have met with some who have never been ten miles away from their birthplace.” Do not be quick to judge, in this fast-paced era, she cautioned, for “they are by no means among the dull ones of the earth; indeed, their simple wisdom and shrewdness are in many ways quite equal to those of their brethren in the wider world.”1 Jekyll set out to do a cultural excavation of a bioregional aesthetic in Old West Surrey, much as Waldo Frank would do in Our America several years later, when he unearthed a U.S. vernacular that had been made impertinent by the increasing voracious appetite for cheap, industrial labor.“Mechanical progress” had split life into “myriad departments,” Frank wrote, dazzling but deadening the mind. “Every calling had a thousand machines. Newspaper and Technical school and telegraph and telephone loaded the average mind with a surfeit of details to be mastered for the making of money.”2 Both Jekyll and Frank gave voice to a way of life that was seen in the early twentieth century as an impediment to progress. In the preface to Old West Surrey, Jekyll sensed the change: Formerly, within a mile or two of one’s home, it was a rare thing to see a stranger, and people’s lives went leisurely. Now, the strain and throng and 72

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unceasing restlessness that have been induced by all kinds of competition, and by ease of communication, have invaded this quiet corner of the land. In the older days, London might have been at a distance of two hundred miles. Now one never can forget that it is little more than an hour’s journey.3 Jekyll’s anger, however, was directed more toward the “modern exchange” in which “common things of daily use” are bartered for “cheap pretentious articles, got up with veneer and varnish and shoddy material.” She provides a catalog of those items that have been abandoned, titling chapters “Cottages and Farms,” “The Old Furniture of Cottage and Farmhouse,” “The Cottage Fireside,” “Cottage Ornaments,” “Crockery and Table Ware,” “Various Articles Found in Cottages,” “Home Industries,” “Tools and Rural Industries,” “Old Country Folk—Their Ways of Speech.” Included was a chapter titled “Cottage Gardens,” a topic that was her life’s work. So persistent was Jekyll in pressing her point that fully three-quarters of the book examines the clothing, speech, and even occupations of a lifestyle that, she was convinced, would soon vanish into a shadowed land—irreversibly and completely. (She personally rescued many of those items, such as examples of Wealden ironwork made obsolete by changes in production and lifestyles, now preserved in the permanent Jekyll collection at the Guildford Museum, near West Surrey.) But the vernacular motif required an intimacy with soil and local building materials, she realized.4 Though less costly, such imports as bricks and slates were more destructive overall to the aesthetic harmony of the land. Jekyll viewed gardening as a unifying element within the Arts and Crafts arena, and her ability to integrate it into a pastoral aesthetic established her as an innovative thinker for her time.5 This “old country,” as she called the vernacular, was little more than a short commute from the metropolis of London—a trip that was becoming all too terrifyingly brief and routine. “The practical boundaries of our country,” she proposed, were an imaginary “long chalk line.”There was, if one was needed, a visual boundary: Hog’s Back to the north, Guildford to the east, and Weald of Sussex to the south. “We hardly ever go northward beyond Hog’s Back, except of course in the train,” she admitted, “which does not count, and we do not go down to the Weald.We like to look out from our southward-facing hills and see right across the Weald to the long, dim, blue-hazy line of the South Downs, and to know that beyond this is the sea, and then France, and the rest of the world.”6 (One imagines Walter Jekyll gazing out from his hilltop hermitage or Herbert Jekyll peering out from his dusty windowpane.) The roots of one’s perceptions, Gertrude Jekyll believed, determined the texture of that view.And texture, for Jekyll, was everything.7 Like her brother Walter in Jamaica, she was also interested in the songs and

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folkways of this “old country” that once had saturated the countryside. Instead of mourning the loss, however, or adding a condescending “good riddance” (the Jekylls were from a class that worked hand-in-glove with the English Crown against the masses), she went about documenting the lyrics that were used in work and play. Her revolt—if it can be called that—was a personal one, motivated by a love of place and the soil. One of the verses she particularly wished to preserve was “The Old Ploughman’s Song,” which was “sung in the neighbouring villages, where it has a local record of quite a hundred years.”The piece is evocative of those rustic “songs” that her younger brother, Walter, transcribed in his travels around the Clarendon Hills of Jamaica, where Claude McKay was born.“But its age,” she reminded modern readers in London and New York, was “written in its wording.” A word that meant something else in another time, such as painful, she explained, has a completely different nuance today.What she meant is that language—and its fine lattice— arises from meaningful work.The poem is written out “by the present singer,” she says, including herself in this pastoral history, much like McKay’s talking rustic, “and though some of the lines are rugged and their sense obscure, I thought it best to transcribe it faithfully, without attempting to mend the weaker places.”8 Jekyll realized what she was up against.Time would never be reversed, and the authenticity of the historical record had to be faithful. While all the Jekylls had a predilection for gardening, only Walter and Gertrude gave it a sense of mission and urgency. Her painstaking devotion to detail and her empathy with the common folk, in fact, were replicated, three years later, in Walter’s research on annancy tales and work rhymes.9 Except for Walter, most of the family had served in the military or government; Edward was a captain, and Herbert was a colonel. Caroline, the oldest sister, married a commissioner of fisheries. Another family adventurer in the colonies, besides Walter, was John Jekyll, who had been a customs collector and, briefly, a slave owner in New England. He returned to England after the Revolutionary War, which ended the family’s U.S. legacy. (Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia, is named in honor of Sir Joseph Jekyll, a distant relative, despite his Tory sympathies.) Walter and Gertrude also shared a passion for taxonomy, which was a way to deal with the real and imagined threats of an encroaching mechanical culture. In the Victorian period, there was a corresponding relationship between the rise in popularity of amateur science and systems of natural classifications and an appreciation of rural values.10 Like the ploughman’s verse, McKay’s “songs” are shaped by hundreds of years of history, in migrations from Africa to the Caribbean, and are written in a style that travels from mother to father, son to daughter. But it is this sense of collision with the modern era that unites these two poetics across lands.

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“The Old Ploughman’s Song,” which evolves from a different geography and climate, begins by praising peasant labor: Come all you Jolly Ploughmen, with courage Stout and Bold, That labours all the Winter in Stormy Winds and Cold, To clothe the Fields with Plenty, your Farm Yards to renew To crown them with Contentment behold the painful Plough. The plough is established within a larger pastoral tradition, and the verse uses biblical allusions in much the same way McKay might use annancy or Romantic imagery in evoking the Jamaican countryside. All, however, connect with the soil, as the song continues: Adam was a Ploughman when ploughing did begin The next that did succeed him was Cain his eldest Son None of this generation that’s calling now pursue The bread that may be wanting remains the painful Plough. The ploughman laments the neglect of the “Garden” which has given a unique cultural voice—and authority—to the “Plough.”There is a dialogic at work, however, and it reaches critical juncture in the twentieth century: Adam in the Garden was sent to keep it right The length of time he stayed there I believe it’s said one night Yet of his own labours I call it not his due For soon he lost his Garden and went and held the Plough. Finally comes the gardener’s desire to return to the soil, in all its complexity, and aid “the Plough.” The struggle is against modernity, but also a search for a sense of place, real or imagined: Oh Ploughman said the Gardener don’t count your trade with ours Walk through the Garden and View the earliest Flowers Also the curious borders and the pleasant View There’s not such peace and plenty performed by the Plough. Behold the wealthy Merchant that Trades in Foreign Seas That brings us Gold and Treasures for those that live at Home at Ease For we must have Bread and Biscuits, Rice Flour Pudding and Pease To feed our Jolly Sailors, as they Sails on the Seas. The poem ends with a dire warning that wealth is not simply about material possession but is community derived and is sustained through daily interactions with the earth (which keeps it fresh in the imagination)—a theme of supreme importance to Jekyll and others in the Arts and Crafts tradition.

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Sampson was the Strongest Man and Soloman was Wise Alexander for Conqueror was all His daily Pride King David he was Valliant and many a Thousand Slew Yet none of His Brave Heroes could live without the Plough. I hope there is none offended with me for singing this For it was not intended for any thing amiss But if considered rightly you will find what I say is true That the Wealth of the Nation depends upon the Plough. The plough, in its trans-Atlantic synthesis, conjures the garden, the village, the old ways, but for colonials also the new—universal sentiments that are adopted and refashioned by McKay. Like “The Old Ploughman’s Song,” McKay’s poems speak to English gardeners who felt that it was their duty to preserve the “wealth of the nation.” But that wealth has no allegiances and travels inspirationally from colony to homeland with the same rough-hewn message. Unlike the ploughman’s lament, however, there was no “tradition” turned under by modernity for McKay (Africa meant little to him, though he spoke as “Afric’s son”), no biblical search for a utopian frontier. Although the Jamaican vernacular had a similar tone of defiance, it arose out of specific circumstances, in response to the slave trade and colonization. Obviously, the issue went beyond West Surrey, and beyond Clarendon Hills for that matter, in Walter and Gertrude Jekyll’s idealization of this folk aesthetic—“the ways and lives and habitations,” recalled Gertrude Jekyll, “of the older people of the working class of the country I have lived in almost continuously ever since I was a very young child.”Was it their revolt against consumer culture and a rising middle class, or were they simply misfits, uncomfortable with their own class inbreeding? “Machines and modernity were her hatreds,” explained Sally Festing, Gertrude Jekyll’s biographer.11 And as mechanical culture increasingly mimicked the language of fascism, war, and the senseless uniformity apace throughout the world, brother and sister viewed the folk and cottage-garden aesthetics as pockets of resistance—noble outposts amid the swirl of change.12 Their interest in the vernacular glanced backward, with an eye to the future. It would salvage a spiritless dystopia of consumption and greed. In 1870, the appearance of William Robinson’s Wild Garden forecasted the profound changes in store for Victorian formalism, which had become the cornerstone and chief export of English imperialism. This was the first of many attempts to unite plough and gardener. Robinson had a close relationship with both Walter and Gertrude Jekyll and shared the concern for the “simple masses”—whether in town, village, the colonies, or flowerbeds—of midcentury intellectuals such as John Ruskin and William Morris. Between 1870 and 1871, Robinson published five books that signaled a new approach

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to gardening: The Garden, Alpine Flowers for English Gardens, A Catalogue of Hardy Perennials, Hardy Flowers, and The Subtropical Garden. The Wild Garden, though, was the most groundbreaking, its very title intended to “shock staid Victorian sensibilities and the aesthetic preferences of those gardeners who loved neat, tightly formed, and closely pruned carpet-beds.”13 Up until now, the wealth of imperial England had lavishly imposed itself upon garden design. As Charles McIntosh explained in 1853: “The man of taste and wealth, in any part of Britain, may have his garden adapted to the climate, and affording the products of any part of the world he pleases.” McIntosh described several ways these outbeddings—densely packed, raised beds of uniform height and color—could be adapted: architectural, tonsile (using topiary), sculpturesque, Italian, French, and Dutch; the picturesque and the gardenesque, divided into pictorial, geometric, refined, and rough.14 “At present,” complained Jekyll of this mathematical mumble-jumble,“the rule is no art, no good grouping, no garden picture, no variety.”15 Robinson’s solution was to combine hardy exotics with more native flowers, in what he called “half-wild” locations.16 He believed that the garden must be judged by the same aesthetics that determine beauty in art—by its honesty and truthfulness. “The man who uses trees instead of pigments has a noble task,” he explained.The test of a garden’s real symmetry, for Robinson, was the imaginary “picture” made upon the mind’s eye.17 For these English cottage gardeners, the debut of McKay’s poems was electrifying. Many saw him as an example of the real thing: the peasant gardener in the bush.18 Much like the ubiquitous “Ploughman,” whose words touched every tiller’s heart, McKay’s lyrics were understood by gardeners everywhere, but there was an exotic overlay that no Garden correspondent could replicate, however removed from civilization. Late nineteenth-century gardening—what soon became, in effect, commonwealth gardening—was a powerful recuperative tool. Such projects as the breakdown of the plantation system, the reversal of clear-cutting, and the emphasis on open spaces and land reform, initiated by Olivier and others in the colonies, were applauded at home in the metropolis. Reciprocally, English horticulture took on the texture and imagination of Africa, Asia, North and South America, and the Caribbean. George F. Wilson, the working-class son of a candlemaker and a respected gardener at the Royal Horticultural Society, for instance, imagined his garden as “a place where plants from all over the world grow wild,” the entryway, via migration and adaptation, into formal English aesthetics.19 McKay understood this and quickly mastered, with Walter Jekyll’s help, the language, stance, and discourse of those sympathetic, radical horticulturists who had a desire to nurture and “repair” the exotic, to mend and strengthen by grafting and hybridity. Gradually, he viewed himself as a cultural hybrid as well, the end genus of dispersal and collation. Although horticulture has

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received “scant State consideration,” a page-one editorial in the January 13, 1900, Garden begins, “we are advancing steadily in improving its aspect in many ways—in fruit culture, hybridisation, to acquire greater variety of flowers and improved forms of fruit and vegetables.” Plant diversity seemed to be on the minds of many fin-de-siècle gardeners: “When the horticultural history of the nineteenth century comes to be written,” the editors announced, “plant hybridisation should form its most splendid chapter.” At one international conference on the topic, the editors had marveled at the large numbers of plant enthusiasts and amateur botanists who arrived from abroad “to take their part in an important event which concerned not merely our own land, but the nations of the world.” Places like Jamaica were viewed as laboratories whose inhabitants— through such traditions as annancy, work rhymes, and passive resistance—were hardy varieties of “the real thing,” kilned from the soil. The Garden’s editors wrote in their December 29, 1900, editorial of a majestic and sweeping garden history and of a glowing future for the traditional garden: Many perhaps hardly know how rich our country is in gardens stately and beautiful, some of them built and planted even as far back as the Tudor times, but many more in the next 150 years. Many of those old gardens had been neglected, some have been destroyed; but for the most part those that remain to our own days are now carefully and wisely tended and day by day are being brought back into right harmony with the palace or great house or homely manor, for which they were designed as the fitting environment. Every day their owners are learning more about their garden’s needs, and learning also how to use in suitable relation to these fine old places, the much enlarged range of beautiful vegetation (most of it unknown to our forefathers) that is now only awaiting careful and critical use. Amateur gardeners such as Herbert’s wife Agnes Jekyll, who collected kitchen recipes and fussed over McKay’s well-being, wanted to preserve and cross-breed as well, not for exhibition or productivity but as remedy to British zeal and efficiency, which they saw as repetitive, uniform, and “beef-witted,” to quote another gardener, the Jamaican governor Sydney Olivier.20 Hybridists disliked the imposition of another’s morality on a village population as much as they fumed at the incision of annuals into a patch of secluded perennials, and they viewed their work with a degree of hedonistic abandon. “If we follow nature,” remarked Forbes Watson, a botanist, “we should scorn so much formal neatness, spreading often over so large a space of ground, and should cultivate a more noble splendour with proper variety and repose.”21 A corollary to horticultural discourse involved the cultivation of poetry and music that celebrated the country.This, too, was crucial for the success of

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the “artist-gardener.”And no one, explained Watson, can have a healthy love of flowers or be a true artist-gardener unless she loves the wild ones.22 McKay’s poem “The Biter Bit,” for instance, dealt with the natural cycle in the colonies, which was, as Olivier discovered, unique and unpredictable. McKay, however, imposes his own cottage-gardening philosophy as a palimpsest to English horticultural discourse.With its vernacular culture and unique growing methods, Jamaican cottage gardening was as threatened by the imposition of plantation uniformity as that lifestyle under assault by modernity in Old West Surrey: Both spoke the same vernacular in their struggle to work in harmony with nature. Consequently, it was not unusual for McKay to be compared readily with Robert Burns, another son of the soil who wrote in dialect. Gertrude Jekyll was surprised by the similarities between the natural rhythms of the English and Jamaican countryside, which brought her closer to the peasant’s plough. In fact, her brother Walter borrowed much of Gertrude’s language to describe Jamaicans, and it seemed that Clarendon Hills and West Surrey had, indeed, much in common.23 It was that other world—the encroaching metropolis of empire—that now loomed as an alien and unfamiliar lifestyle. For Walter and Gertrude Jekyll, these peasants were a refuge: “Bright and cheerful of face, pleasant and kindly of speech, courteous of manner, they are a precious reminder of those older days when men’s lives were simpler and quieter.”24 In their pursuits, ancestral ties were realized and reimagined over a vast geography of country. McKay’s poems such as “Me Bannabees” or “The Biter Bit” contained a wealth of folk wisdom.What made them especially exciting for English readers was their style—the dialect, of course, but also the incredible detail and cataloging, which appealed to the scientific and exotic-seeking tastes of the Victorian looking for clues and hidden meaning that would reconnect them to this larger country. They are easily accessible as well, despite the dialect, recognizable first-person observations in the familiar garden-diary form popularized by Romantic poets such as Mary Wordsworth. McKay’s poems chronicled, however, the daily struggles of Jamaican small landowners, who had come of age under Olivier’s “larger socialism.” This peasant-gardener needed to be vigilant against the encroachments of agribusiness and clearcutting, “The Biter Bit” intimates—concerns that Jekyll and other gardeners sensitively understood. “Me Bannabees,” “The Biter Bit,” and “A Dream” are dense with folkloric allusions and, with the addition of Walter Jekyll’s annotations, have a degree of authority that sheds light on the Jamaican traditions and customs—hybridized,African, and indigenous—that were so new and intriguing. Included in Songs of Jamaica, “Me Bannabees” (the title, translated by Jekyll, means “my climbing bean or peas”) begins with a powerful image of nature that overruns and ultimately entangles humanity:

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Run ober mango trees, ‘Preach chock to kitchen doo,’ Watch de blue bannabees, Look how it ben’ down low! De blossom draw de bees Same how de soup draw man; Some call it “broke-pot” peas, It caan’ bruk we bu’n’pan. Wha’ sweet so when it t’ick? Though some call it goat-tud, Me all me finger lick, An’ yet no chew me cud. A mumma plant de root Oe day jes’ out o’ fun; But now look ’pon de fruit, see wha’ de “mek fun” done. I jam de ’tick dem ’traight Soon as it ’tart fe ’preach, An begin count de date Fe when de pod fe shed. Me watch de vine dem grow, S’er t’row dung a de root: Crop time look fe me slow, De bud tek long fe shoot. But so de day did come, I ’crub de bu-n-pan bright, An’ tu’n down ’pon it from De marnin’ till de night. An’ Lard! Me belly swell, No cause de peas no good, But me be’n tek a ‘pell Mo’ dan a gaint would. Yet eben after dat Me nyam it wid a will, ’Causen it mek me fat; So I wi’ lub it still. Caan’ talk about gungu, Fe me it is no peaces; Cockstone might do fe you Me want me bannabees.

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For English gardeners, whether in the country or city, bannabees, goat-tud (a poisonous plant that resembles the bannabees), gungu (Congo peas, brought on slave ships from Africa), and cockstone (red peas from North America) revealed a world that swirls with change and collision. And it is mirrored in the many routes of this diaspora, plant and human, confirming the significance of their commonwealth varieties. Consequently, more than for their lyricism, the poems were valued for those details of colonial gardening and descriptions of adaptations brought about primarily by the African slave trade and the creolizing of English influences. But even gungu and cockstone are passed over for the genuine “blue bannabees,” which seem to run chaotically “ober mango trees” up to the very kitchen door, within reach of picking—the ideal humanplant relationship! Readers were also dazzled by the proximity and harmonious blends of migratory and native plants that were so compactly fitted into the fifty-page Songs of Jamaica. Almost every page conveyed insights important for botanical and ethnographic research information through the use of persona and metaphor. McKay’s poems connect to a broad and modern pastoral. “A Labourer’s Life Give Me,” for instance, builds upon the sentiments expressed in “The Old Ploughman’s Song,” but through the “eyes and ears,” to quote Sydney Olivier, of a colonial rustic.25 The poet also scoffs at the promises of industrial capitalism, and McKay, in that peasant guise, reminds us that he is “never ashamed o’ de soil.” The poem, however, diverges from the traditions of “The Old Ploughman’s Song,” whose biblical allusions ground its agrarian meaning, and seeks roots in other places such as Africa. But McKay quickly informs his readers,“So you need’t remind me of it,” and moves on toward synthesis instead of sentimentalism. (“Afric’s son,” in another poem, “George William Gordon to the Oppressed Natives,” is “dyin in a foreign land / Crush beneat’ de moil and toil.”) Yet though Africa may be the source of longing, it is not the only aesthetic destination for the poem. As McKay moves in and out of his imaginary country, there is transformation and change along the way. In “A Labourer’s Life Give Me,” he again tells us: I was born midst de moil an’ de toil, An’ I’ll never despise it a bit. He informs his garden readers of the old ways of harvesting and cultivation in Jamaica. “Sen’ me back to de cutliss an’ hoe!” I don’t mind, Sir, a wud dat you say, For little, it seems, you do know Of de thing dat you sneer at to-day.

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And McKay places himself in the poem as well, as the sage rustic, which offers us the drama of a first-person native account.“If I’d followed a peasant’s career,” he warns us, I would now be a happier lad; You would not be abusing me here, An’ mekin’ me sorry an’ sad. In turning aside his own “precious birthright,” the speaker opts for an industrial job. It is a betrayal of ideals that he regrets. But he is only more resolute now to pursue the peasant’s way: Fool! I hated my precious birthright, Scornin’ what made my father a man; Now I grope in de pitchy night, Hate de day when me poo’ life began. To de loved country life I’ll return, I don’t mind at all, Sir, if you smile’ As a peasant my livin’ I’ll earn, An a labourer’s life is worth while. As a labourer’s livin’ content, Wid at night a rest-place for me head, Oh! How gaily my life will be spent, Wid de baneful ambition gone dead. An’ when, after a day’s wukin’ hard, I go home to a fait’ful wifee, For my toilin’ dere’ll be its reward, A peaceful heart happy an’ free. In his poems, McKay’s emphasizes the folk community values that are sustained by the earth, and this, too, appealed to readers who were disenchanted with and wary of the Mechanical Age.“A Labourer’s Life Give Me” continues: An’ me children shall grow strong an’ true, But I’ll teach dem dat life is a farce, An’ de best in dis wul’ dey can do Is to bear with content its sad cross. So I’ll make meself happy at home, An’ my life will be pleasanter yet; I will take de hard knocks as dey come, But will conquer de worry an’ fret. But even McKay’s “labourer” is of a different type, one who “sends a new blood a-flow’n’ t’rough me veins,” quite unlike the heroic ploughman or Wordsworth’s solitary reaper. This one is born into the migrant’s life and has

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masterfully adapted to the terrain of the twentieth century.The poet ends with the declaration: “Oh! A labourer’s life is my desire.”The poem unites—while it simultaneously hybridizes—traditions in Jamaica with those rooted in Scotland,Africa, and even West Surrey.Yet McKay does not idolize his peasant, and there was much to fault (this trait of not elevating one group over another the poet seemed to have acquired from Olivier), while he kept his “eyes and ears” close to the register of more diasporic melodies. The soil is the medium for those larger melodies, and it becomes his passport to other realms and readers. (The cartography around which he resists and presses culture is clearly a vernacular world—and even later, it influences McKay’s “aesthetic” objects— preferring to focus on migrant workers in Pittsburgh and Baltimore, Africans and West Indians in London’s East End, sailors in Marseilles, Russian peasants, and Arab street urchins in Tangier.) Gertrude Jekyll once remarked to William Robinson that she was unable to imagine a house without knowing the particular site, a sentiment that seems to gibe with McKay’s, all of whose images reflect this shadowed country emerging in the traditional rustic’s retreat. “A house must grow,” Jekyll explained,“up between the ground on one side & its master on the other & must marry both.”26 Likewise, McKay’s register touched the lower frequencies of “The Old Ploughman’s Song,” as well as the high lyricism of “The Solitary Reaper.”And when the poet writes in “My Native Land, My Home,” included in Songs of Jamaica, that there is “no land dat can compare,” the message had been built thoroughly upon ground gardeners and Romantics all recognized: Wid you where’er I roam’ In all de wul’ none like you fair, My native land, my home. McKay in this poem boldly pronounced this idyllic land “de nigger’s place,” one without racial roots that reflected the mood of McKay and others of the African diaspora who were, essentially, dwelling as a “no-land race”:27 No mind whe’ some declare; Although dem call we “no-land race,” I know we home is here. In this “no-land race” we get a sense of an emerging condition of a complicated exile, and it would continue to be a source of inspiration, wonderment, and creativity for McKay and the recipients of his verse, whether Olivier, the Jekylls, or readers in the metropolis and country.This characterization may explain why Stuart Hall believes that the Caribbean is the preeminent place for the articulation of a modern diaspora and exemplifies “something else between,” a place where “newness enters the world.”28 Jamaica is visualized and expressed during the period not only as a vast botanic cauldron, but also as an

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artistic workshop—and one upon which a broadly defined Arts and Crafts aesthetic might flourish and blossom throughout the commonwealth. “My Native Land, My Home” continues: You give me life an’ nourishment, No udder land I know; My lub I neber can repent, For all to you I owe. E’ev ef you mek me beggar die, I’ll trust you all de same, An’ none de less on you rely, Nor saddle you wid blame. Though you may cas’ me from your breas’ An’ trample me to deat’, My heart will trus’ you none the less, My land I won’t feget. Like McKay’s early work, “My Native Land, My Home” is about the endurance of that diasporic vision.A colonial peasant can be abused, assimilated, even tortured, but he will never lose sight of the soil. Is it this “fertile land” that McKay’s peasant struggles with, an elusive place that works against a more implacable English empire he associates with “all dem little chupidness” of domination and control. The poem ends, like the ploughman’s song, on an ominous turn: Still all dem chupidness Caan’ tek away me lub; De time when I’ll tu’n ’gains you is When you can’t give me grub. Although buccra, the plantation overseer, hovers as a reminder of one’s dispossession, it is “gover’mint”—the Colonial Office and the machinery of empire—that disturbs the poet’s “naygur soul.” Thus, a call for home—for those of the upper class, such as Gertrude Jekyll, or those of the middle, such as Olivier, who also tilled the soil—becomes, for gardener and poet, a call to arms. In addition, the poem expresses an international configuration that is intimately linked to the land, rootedness, self-determination, and political autonomy (increasingly against the routines of nations that were systematically carving up those spaces). McKay’s perspective of the world is reminiscent of Gertrude Jekyll’s bird’s-eye view of the land from Surrey to France, and the “protected placidity” of Jamaica, a place even Olivier was reluctant to leave for the “troublesome world” of England, is suggested in many of McKay’s verses. Jamaica, in fact, exemplifies the political ideal—a “no-land race” and a tabula rasa where “fetile soil grow all o’ t’ings,” and this would heal the soul as well

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as the body. The island, metaphorically, is an attraction for “de t’ousan from deir shore”—the modernist tourist as well as the dogged, nineteenth-century cultural adventurer. For this tar-heeled peasant, neither assimilation nor enticements of the modern can dilute the love he has for the simple life.29 Gertrude Jekyll became editor of the Garden in 1900, and its credo was a steadfast one: “Out of necessity of Unity, arises that of Variety.” She viewed her task much like that of a modern artist working with a difficult medium: “Should it not be remembered that in setting a garden we are painting a picture, only it is a picture of hundreds of feet or yards instead of so many inches?”30 The English plot was an ostentatious blight in need of repair, Jekyll and her contemporaries believed, and they attempted to integrate every human aspect into their “picture,” which they saw as the rightful offspring more of nature and chance than of art and study: to “sit down humbly at the knees of Mother nature and learn.” They rejected the pretentious Georgian architecture as well as the confining, segregated box designs that accompanied it, and the obsession with heirlooms and greenhouse productivity, which had the frenzy of repetitive factory work.31 Their gardens would be an antidote to the malaise that “the industrial revolution was leaving in its wake.”32 The Garden: An Illustrated Weekly of Horticulture and All Its Branches, begun by William Robinson in 1871, promoted naturalized gardens as a cure-all for the soul, spirit, and human scale of the city and the world. Robinson had been influenced by William Morris and John Ruskin, particularly by the idea that society should build on its wealth and not “introduce the imagination, or imitate the customs of foreign nations or of former times.”33 (When Morris was the editor of the Cambridge and Oxford Magazine in the mid-1800s, he condemned Thomas Carlyle for his facile solution to the “Negro Question” in Jamaica as little more than justification for Eyre’s leveling of peasant villages at Stony Gut.) From the middle to late nineteenth century, greenhouses had become an English convention; they made it convenient for amateurs and enthusiasts to cultivate unusual and exotic plants. As a result, however, gardens became densely packed and hideously ornamental, mere adjuncts to nature. Robinson described them as “the ugliest gardens ever made.”34 Rather he advised moderation.There should be a mix of “native and exotic plants from the temperate regions” in everyday uses: from fields, woods, copses—and in neglected places, the colonies perhaps—to local gardens and parks.35 The Garden editors were also concerned with human density, particularly with the recent changes wrought by the arrival of the automobile and other mechanical conveniences. During this time, Liverpool doubled in size, Glasgow trebled, and London became a teeming metropolis of four million. In 1851, agriculture was the single source of wealth; by 1880 that had all changed.Twice as many people lived in the city as in the country.The editors proposed a garden vision

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for the city which would be developed along an Arts and Crafts aesthetic, combining the convenience of the town and the beauty of the country.“Every human organisation has somewhere a limit of possible expansion,” the editors explained, “and it is plain to see that in the undue growth of a densely populated area so vast as that of this immense city, many of its related groups of inhabitants swell into unmanageable masses that have lost all useful proportion to each other.”36 The Garden’s editors might have been speaking to McKay’s colonial world as well. Jekyll had no sympathy for what she called “the system” and, like her brother Walter, wished for its extinction.37 She criticized the growing clamor for conformity and the “bondage to fashion,” which had driven out all common sense and love of traditions.38 But the Boer War and England’s dogged insistence at maintaining the appearance of normalcy for the empire at all costs, even as oppressed and oppressors rebelled, marked the beginning of a slide toward global conflict and the destruction of the land.As the old century folded into the new, Gertrude Jekyll cautiously reached out to Garden readers.“Over the last months,” the editors remarked in the January 13, 1900, issue, “the cloud of war has hovered, darkening many a home in our wave-lapped isles and beyond the seas.”The remedy was to pursue “the peaceful art of gardening.” Devoting oneself to horticulture and gardening would be a deterrent to—and maybe even reverse—this new barbarity, which had machines and science at its disposal. In turning to simpler things, the editors hoped that “this gardening spirit, a wholesome, healthful and life-giving recreation, will extend its influence to the benefit of humanity.” While the English have always viewed themselves as a gardening nation, the “present age,” the editors noted, was particularly crucial—even more “than in the early days of the Victorian era.” It was also quite a different task from “those who at one period considered the garden as a shop from which to draw daily stores.” The editors also encouraged the artist-gardener to fully realize the imagination of the hand, eyes, and spirit and urged them to “find enjoyment in [gardening’s] poetic aspect.” The commonwealth garden should reflect the artistry of its cultivators around the globe in verse, such as was found in the full-bodied songs of McKay.The mission of these artist-gardeners should be to “grow the flowers and fruits with a keen sense of satisfaction in the knowledge that a world hereto veiled in mystery is being explored and is yielding undreamed-of pleasure.”Within the pages of the magazine, there were reports on exciting botanical discoveries in Africa, North and South America, the Middle East, India, China, and Japan.Whatever the locale, it seemed to Garden readers, there was always a plot to tend, regardless of shifting borders and political unrest. Thus the timely advice for expatriates and colonials from one correspondent, an “Englishman doing his duty” in the “Nileless desert” of the Soudan: “Solitary prisoner though he was—at least his last anxious days were

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somewhat refreshed and solaced by his little garden.”The imperial dictum of horticulturists was: Every Englishman to your plot—even in arid Khartum!39 But there was also uneasiness about that taxonomy and geography.“Horticulturists,” the Garden urged in its January 13, 1900, editorial, should no longer be preoccupied with the enrichment merely of their own plots, but with those of others as well, to add to the “storehouse of new and improved forms of plant life.” It should be incumbent upon gardeners to encourage dialogue and diversity among wildlife and human communities. “This restless age,” the editors remarked, “urges the younger horticulturist to follow in the footsteps of those good men whose earthly work has not been completed, but remains for others to take up and again hand down to future generations.” (McKay would describe just such missionary zeal in his 1933 novel Banana Bottom.) The editors advocated for an activist, engaged gardener who would be willing to think beyond the bland formalism of the Victorian box. The work that still needed to be done, they were quick to stress, involved naturalizing tropical and native specimens to interbreed for hardiness, and to work in their own gardens as well, in pushing at that imaginary chalk line. Alongside native ferns and the stubborn but fragrant loniceria, Jekyll experimented with yuccas from Mexico, adiantum maritima from Algeria, and exotic ferns from Brazil. She began sending cuttings to Kew Gardens, the central repository for botanical specimens, from about 1883 on. Something here too needed mending, much like her record that preserved West Surrey. Commonwealth gardening had an interdependency that reflected the fragile conditions of plants uprooted and in movement. In one of many numerous garden-journal entries, Jekyll noted excitedly that the first blooms of iris stylosa, which she had planted on her return from Algiers, were extraordinary and thriving in their new home.40 Movement and adaptation, she believed (even as she became more firmly rooted to West Surrey), would benefit future generations, those who would understand the significance of this work. McKay, as well, was a hardy specimen of hybridity, and for gardeners in England exhausted with the uniformity of their lives, his poems moved along this exciting new garden-city integration, connecting the local to the global, the urban with the rural. He, like Jekyll, spoke to this imaginary unsubjugated future country.“My belonging to a subject race,” he explained,“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.”41 Some of the most enthusiastic reviews of Songs of Jamaica, the collection of McKay’s nature poems published in 1912, appeared in the Garden and Gardening Illustrated, and both Gertrude and Agnes Jekyll, whose gardening tips in the Times of London provoked thousands of timid homebodies, promoted this synthesis of the country with the colonies. “Those who wish to see what the country is like in this beautiful island,” the Gleaner boasted, “will get charming pictures of it here. The poet loves his

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home, and makes us love it too. He dwells much upon the plant life and bird life of his Clarendon hills.”42 The Garden review, which appeared on January 27, 1912, praised the poet for his knowledge of plant varieties, such as the foxtails and “lush Calalu by the brookside,” which were particularly dense in such poems as “A Dream,” where one is overpowered in the sticky aroma of freshcut cane amid an enchanting “tropic music.” Readers puzzled over the many “interesting allusions” to plants and plant characteristics, particularly “food plants,” such “Bananas, Peas, Beans, Yams, Calalu (Spinach), Cocoes, Sweet Potatoes, etc.” And there was pleasure in following the poet’s eye, “caught by the blue tint of the Maize and the modest flower of the Cockstones (French Beans),” as he dwells, in satisfaction, upon “the growth of the Bannabees (a climbing Bean) scrambling over the Mango in the yard and of the lush Calalu by the brookside.” As for tropical flowers, which would interest Jekyll and other artist-gardeners, his poem “does not fail to mark the blueness of the leaf of the Dog Rose, which the lad picks to give his lass; and the Bellflowers (Daturas), fading under the heat of the climbing sun, show by their wilting their sympathy with the lovers who sit beneath the Yampy shade.”43 Even as McKay’s poetic interests paralleled this horticultural yearning, there was a reimagining of the literary landscape as well, in which the venerable dog rose of Shakespeare’s era transforms itself in Songs of Jamaica into “De Dog-Rose,” which, like that Jamaican bannabee, clings stubbornly to “de corner-stone.”Yet in “De Dog-Rose,” this rose, like the poinsettia, becomes a piece in the puzzle of the continual unfolding of the colonial: Growin’ by de corner-stone, See de pretty flow’r-tree blows, Sendin’ from de prickly branch A lubly bunch of red dog-rose. An’ de bunch o’ crimsonred, Boastin’ on de dark blue tree, Mekes it pretty, prettier yet Jes’ as dat dog-rose can be. Young Miss Sal jes’ come from school: Freddy, fresh from groun’ an’ grub, Pick de dog-rose off de tree, Gib Miss Sal to prove his lub An’ I listen to deir talk, As dey say dey will be true; “Eber true” I hear dem pledge, An’ dat naught can part dem two. The dog rose is found in Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets and was a familiar trope in Renaissance poetry, associated with disease and sickness. But

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the dog rose was used by Shakespeare to express modern views that were contrary to medieval beliefs about marriage and procreation—such radical notions as love and desire, for instance. It symbolized fidelity, in an ironic inversion of meaning that McKay uses as well. Throughout Shakespeare’s sonnets, the image of the rose persists as a conceit that anchors, as well as offsets, love and betrayal. Thus it projects the gloss of high culture for McKay, and the image was carefully inserted into his poetic narrative. It would validate—and, he hoped, problematize—his Creole love affair. McKay sets his literary course between these two currents, and in his love affair, both traditions—one English, the other hybridized—enter a nuptial dance. The poet’s own transplanted dog rose is a tenacious specimen and sustains itself upon that deep culture of Derrida’s différence instead of on the decay and frailty of Renaissance indiscretion. It also has the toughness of Olivier’s doubletalking hybridity. In moving to Jamaica, the plant becomes a harbinger of dispossession, too, expressing the anxiety many Jamaicans, including McKay, felt about their precarious place in colonial society.44 Thus, while his verse might convey a “charming naiveté” that delighted the English reader, it also masquerades as cultural discourse, mirroring the more formal Victorian attempts at literature described by Isobel Armstrong. Here, however, the lyrics are keyed, again, to that international ear and eye at which many commonwealth gardeners worked. The turning point in “De Dog-Rose” occurs when “de rose is not,” and its beauty—and symbolic meaning—withers. Here those traditions collide but also separate, in using Brent Hayes Edwards’s earlier analogy for diaspora.This is a moment of vulnerability, for the poem as well as for the Jamaican author. The verse ends with Fred, Sal’s lover and a peasant of “groun’ an’ grub,” stricken with grief and “huggin up de corner-stone”—transitioning, it seems, into a tenacious native plant. His teary eyes fall upon the pesky petchary, a voracious flycatcher common in the West Indies, but it too is transformed into a foreboding specter. Images and traditions morph, then reappear in sudden new meaning, and we are in that contact zone of the shadowed land that McKay invokes again and again.The petchary’s circular movements, like a whirling tropical storm, have a specific meaning for Fred, who wonders “how de whole t’ing gwin fe go.” (It is this petchary, perhaps, that circles in the shadow of Yeats’s falcon in the opening line of “The Second Coming”: “Turning turning in the widening gyre.”Yeats’s gyre is of traditions—Western, Europe—collapsing inward toward a religious center, a Bethlehem possibly, or a Canterbury. McKay’s petchary spirals outward.) Sal in the meantime trades her love for financial security and runs off with “anedder man” from the “land / O’ de Injin coney.”45 Thomas MacDermot, a Scottish poet of some renown, had published One Brown Gal and—A Jamaican Story, which established his reputation as a Creole writer, when McKay began writing. (There seems to have been some rivalry

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between the two writers, and the struggle over voice—and whose voice should convey this island sensibility—seems encoded in “De Dog-Rose.”) Thus a Scottish as well as a Creole tradition touches Sal’s heart. (Ironically, MacDermot becomes threaded into this island romance and becomes an object of desire as well. But his presence is like that Scottish Creole madman who stalks Bita Plant in Banana Bottom, McKay’s third novel, and hovers wraithlike, in silence.) The petchary and the dog rose soon disappear, and the turbulence stills. Sal finally takes her place in “the great-house,” cooing to her newborn, a survivor, it appears, in this resurgent Renaissance drama. Is the poet, who has skillfully threaded two traditions in a dialogical lyric, hinting that “life”—and in fact poetic freedom—begins with accommodation? This appropriation, and the reinvention of traditions, seems to be McKay’s attempt at resolution for himself, as well as for his lovers.This seems to be the poem’s muted message. “Beneath the Yampy Shade” is another Creole love poem in Songs of Jamaica that mirrors and parodies the “aristocratic language,” as McKay called it, of the Renaissance and Romantic eras.46 “We sit beneat’ de yampy shade,” its folk-peasant hero tell us, with his “lee sweetheart.” Around them “de gully ripples ‘cross de glade” and the “Tom Raffins hurry by.” In the lines that follow, his mother and father work nearby in the field, harvesting sugarcane— again reminding us of the looming presence of that colonial enterprise: Her pa an’ ma about de fiel’ Are brukin sugar-pine; An’ plenty, plenty is de yiel’, Dem looks so pink an’ fine. We listen to a rapturous tune Outpourin’ from above; De swee-swees, blithesome birds of June, They sing to us of love. She plays wid de triangle leaves, Her hand within mine slips; She murmurs love, her bosom heaves, I kiss her ripe, ripe lips. De cockstones raise deir droopin’ heads To view her pretty feet; De skellions trimble in deir beds, Dey grudge our lub so sweet— Love sweeter than a bridal dream, A mudder’s fondest kiss; Love purer than a crystal stream, De height of eart’ly bliss.

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We hear again de swee-swees’ song Outpourin’ on de air; Dey sing for yout’, an’ we are young An’ know naught ‘bounten care. We sit beneat’ de yampy shade, We pledge our hearts anew; De sweet-swees droop, de bell-flowers fade Before our love so true. As Tom Ruffins—“mad ants,” which can be interpreted as the author’s view of the industry of plantation life—scurry by and the swee-swees sing of love, the poet delicately weaves together plant and human, similar to the way Gertrude Jekyll carefully trellised and naturalized her Munstead Wood. Leaves and “hair” mesh rapturously in the poem, and “cockstones” raise “deir droopin’ head” as a lover’s “hand within mine slips.” The humidity of the noonday scarcely can match this “outpourin’ on de air.” The swee-swees droop and the bellflowers—plants best cultivated in the shade—wilt before a “love so true.” But much depends on the rejuvenating ability of the land for this romance to succeed. (And this awkward assignation—in horticultural terms, a forced propagation—is critical for the Oliviers and Jekylls if the land is to endure.This is true in such poems as “King Banana,” where the “ole-time” way of “cultibation” is the subtext to salvation in England and will surely prevail in Jamaica as well.)47 In almost all the early poems, the struggle is essentially agricultural: between the bankrupt plantation, around which this love affair is set, and against the “ole met’od” romanticized by Morris and others of an Arts and Crafts aesthetic. Buccra represents that hated Victorian formalism and exemplifies a lifestyle that defiles the earth. (To artist-gardeners, such formalism was not so healthy for the creative soul either.) Thus, the dog rose’s literary significance is elongated, a reminder that one must “get people back upon the land,” as Gertrude Jekyll prescribed, and awaken our minds, as well, “to the comprehension of the ethical relation of art, not only to the higher human intelligence, but also to the simple needs and experiences of daily life.”48 All these late Victorian concerns merge into a tradition that, for McKay, is literally a living thing of “loam and clay.” It forced him to travel to the margins, much like the commonwealth gardener in search of that rare bloom, “deep, deep” into the nether world where “queer things abound.” McKay later wrote “Like a Strong Tree” in appreciation: Like a strong tree that in the virgin earth Sends far its roots through rock and loam and clay, And proudly thrives in rain or time of dearth, When dry waves scare the rain-come sprites away;

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Like a strong tree that reaches down deep, deep, For sunken water, fluid underground, Where the great-ringed unsightly blind worms creep, And queer things of the nether world abound: So would I live in rich imperial growth, Touching the surface and depth of things, Instinctively responsive unto both, Tasting the sweets of being, fearing no stings, Sensing the subtle spell of changing forms, Like a strong tree against a thousand storms.49 McKay’s garden, like Jekyll’s, is a richly diverse terrain made up of impressions, a picture, as Jekyll was fond of saying, based on balance, not abundance. Wealth, for these rebels, was indeed a matter of perspective—and usefulness. Probably the most convincing reason for a “rebellion in general,” which William Morris had unsuccessfully urged upon Burslem potters in 1881, was the advent of the Automotive Age some twenty years later.Tastes and aesthetics were devalued, locale and workplace disrupted, in so short a period that it seemed to an alien observer as if a natural calamity had occurred. Streets once bustling with life were now eerily shadowed and blank, a perfectly framed tableau. This modern era became synonymous with barbarity, and machines towered as master and slave. Society was out of balance, and there was a deep sense of betrayal—and of falseness. Poets like Laura Riding wrote of the perversity of modernism, while Marxism and capitalism, and society’s increasing reliance on ideology in general, turned Olivier and other Fabians into armchair naysayers. “The real task,” for Riding, was “not to explain modernism in poetry but to separate false modernism, or faith in history, from genuine modernism, or faith in the immediate.” Artistic expression should not be about this or that tradition or lineage, sensibility or pedigree, ideology or group identification. Hadn’t T. S. Eliot remarked that writers always remain loyal to their class? Rather it should be about “fresh poetry, more poetry, poetry based on honest invention, rather than conscientious imitation.”The barbarity in art—and in society—occurs, it seems, when history gives form and prejudices to one’s artistic expression.50 McKay might agree with this sentiment. Art, he believed, whatever its origin, whether “racial, national, or any kind of social,” transcends its “cadre” to become a possession of all humanity.51 But these antimodernists were seen as spoilers who were unwilling to accept the tradeoff of progress. (Ezra Pound expressed just such a criticism in the Blast years later.) Jekyll designed nearly three hundred gardens in England, Europe, the United States, and the Caribbean—collectively, a powerful statement.

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But she produced no grand philosophical works, as did Ruskin and Morris, issued no manifestoes, as had Pound and Eliot, and her interests were perceived as women’s work or, worse, the decadent pastimes of the wealthy. She became associated with the problem, a cog in the progression of change. And when confronted with an ever-persistent ideological war between Left and Right, she retreated to Munstead Wood.Yet Jekyll’s wild garden was the ultimate manifesto, its significance in the clang and clamor of the moment sadly overlooked. Jekyll became involved with the Arts and Crafts movement in 1869, when she met William Morris. It was a disappointing encounter, however, for a young female artist looking for innovation. Morris had advocated for workers’ control over production, a concern for nature, and the integrity of handicrafts over capital—all of which sounded good on paper.Yet Jekyll found the whole industry dishonest when she visited Morris’s workshop and was unimpressed by the worker relations she saw there between men and women. The conditions at Morris and Company, a guildlike association that included Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (brother of Christina Rossetti), which produced handcrafted goods for the home, were far worse than those in the most exploitative low-paying industries. Morris’s wife, his daughter May Morris, Charles Faulkner’s sisters, and Georgiana Burne-Jones were all unpaid laborers in an industry that was quickly coming under scrutiny, particularly in the early twentieth century, by women reformers such as Beatrice Webb in England and Crystal Eastman in the United States. “The only women who received wages,” Jekyll’s biographer, Sally Festing, noted, “were countless employees producing the bulk of the firm’s embroideries.Thus there was a fairly strong form of discrimination in an establishment with radical social aims.”52 Jekyll was shocked by the disregard for gender and monetary equity. There was also a lack of communitarian cohesion, unlike the genuine harmony of West Surrey peasants.This was not an isolated example, however. When the Art Workers’ Guild and Working Men’s Guild was established, for instance, at the insistence of Ruskin, to improve design and to eliminate labor exploitation, their concerns, Jekyll realized, also did not include women, who were excluded from membership—as if one-half of the world’s population could make a revolution. ( Jekyll may have also found it amusing that her appearance contrasted with the ideal pre-Raphaelite image of femininity that so delighted Morris.) These revolutionaries, she realized, were little more than imperial cads in coarse laymen’s clothes.53 Although Gertrude Jekyll was short and stout and wore glasses later in life, there was a solid physical grounding to her presence, as if, indeed, she were gnarly rooted to the earth. She never married and, with Barbara Bodichon, a suffragist, collaborated on Scalands, which they envisioned as a woman’s retreat. Jekyll designed it in the “cottage-garden style” that was her trademark.

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She combined—as McKay did in his poems—disorder with creative unity. Borders became transparent as well as transgressive, and one did not gaze upon this image, remarked visitors to the retreat, as much as live it. It was of such beauty that “will give delight to the eye and repose and refreshment to the mind.”54 In return, Bodichon showed her appreciation by inviting Jekyll to her vacation home in Algiers, where she lived during the English winters. (She was married to a French colonial, a physician, and they had returned to North Africa, she explained,“to study racial problems and the abolition of slavery.”)55 While there, Jekyll befriended a botanist at the University of Algiers, a Monsieur Durango, who would provide Jekyll with numerous specimens over the years from his field trips throughout Africa.56 She excitedly introduced them into her English cottage, and this became her life’s project. “To one who is in sympathy with growing things,” she explained,“there is a keen delight in seeing some beautiful flowering plant for the first time in its own home.” But while in Algiers, she was puzzled by the brash insensitivity of English and French colonials who, in clearing the land, “grub up Dwarf Palm and Cyclamen and the great Scilla maritima and other plants that would be treasures in gardens, throw them into heaps to be burnt.”57 This image of cultural disconnection reminded her how easily this notion of place could be abused, particularly in the colonies. It was an important voyage for Jekyll into the country, as the colonies were known, and her quest began at Lake Geneva, where she vacationed with her brother Walter. From there, she traveled by train to Turin, Genoa, Marseilles, and on to Algeria, where she met Bodichon in the winter of 1873. On her return to England, she integrated into her crafts the design patterns of traditional Moroccan dresses, embroidery, and tiles, which she had spent afternoons sketching, and those too were a part of her masterwork for the commonwealth wild garden.This became her new interest—a reimagined aesthetic, which she conveniently hybridized. ( Jekyll’s orientation to North Africa was one shared by Olivier and later by Ogden, but for her it inaugurated an artistic design trend that continues today. Newspapers in March 2002, for instance, in remarks on the retirement of Yves St. Laurent, a fashion designer, pointed to the revolution he brought about in design with colors and patterns acquired from Algerian and North African folk sources. In fact, Jekyll had broken such ground more than a century earlier.) Even as a student at South Kensington Art School, Jekyll had precociously combined “plant-inspired fabric designs by Christopher Dresser and Owen Jones” with an Arts and Crafts aesthetic that blended utility and common sense; this blending continued as she crossed cultures and locales. Along with that evolution, she mastered more traditional crafts such as embroidery, carving, modeling, house painting, carpentry, smith’s work, repoussé work, gilding, wood inlaying, and, sign painting—all of which she worked into the tapestry

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of her wild garden, the ultimate antiformalist statement.58 She also integrated traditional men’s crafts with so-called women’s work, giving them equal merit as aesthetic expression. In all her endeavors she possessed a wonderful poetic eye (had she not identified with the ploughman’s song?), imagining “homemaking as a whole in relation to life—the best simple English country life of her day.”59 Her success as an artist lay in this keen ability to cobble together disparate elements, much like the weave of McKay’s verse, into a disharmonious whole. Sketches of riding capes, bullock shoes, and details of rush-seated chairs, which she collected in her work on Old West Surrey, cropped up in her workbooks as well.60 All were to be pursued in articulating the many frequencies at which nature moves. Working with William Morris, the twenty-two-year-old Jekyll quickly realized, would only extinguish her enthusiasm and passion, and so she decided to bring her craft and trade to a more sympathetic audience. She called on John Ruskin, by then an elderly and mellow naturalist, and the two immediately took to each other.There were lively exchanges on art, aesthetics, and the significance of nature—“of the beauty of flower and leaf, of the sunny smile of peaceful pastoral land, the angry menace of the storm-cloud, the fearful majesty of mountain masses.”61 Like Jekyll, Ruskin believed that gardening should possess a moral imperative: “Truth applied to art signified the faithful statement, either of the mind or senses, of any fact of nature.”62 Gardening provides that connection to social wealth and moral truth, as well as the common sense of utility, that deepens and enriches society. Industrial England offered little reward beyond a meager sustenance, and factory work was the antithesis of nature and human individuality. Ruskin traveled to the distant past for his ideal worker, embodied in the meticulous detail of medieval crafts, which he viewed as both aesthetic and functional. For these two thinkers, the sublime merged with the so-called profane. Ruskin too contrasted the barbarity of the age with a lack of utility, beauty, and workmanship, and he viewed industrialism as the cause of war, barrenness, and cultural annihilation. (As early as 1862, in Unto This Last, serialized in Thackeray’s popular monthly magazine Cornhill, Ruskin had condemned materialism as the root of that malaise.) Ruskin’s emphasis on nature as a model for a new humanity inspired Jekyll to expand her own aesthetic boundaries. Thus her garden was shaped out of this mid-nineteenth-century “loam and clay” and represented, over the years, a sanctuary from materialism.63 Ruskin, in The Poetry of Architecture of 1837–1838, encouraged the creation of homes that were more honest to the cultural and climatic terrain, which inspired Jekyll to thoroughly reorient Munstead Wood, her garden cottage in West Surrey that looked out onto vast countryside instead of the metropolis. She realized that how one lived—the values one possessed—depended on environment and climate.“Cottages,” she

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noted, should be “hewn from local materials harbouring men and women whose crafts linked them with the land.” Everything fitted, and all, she saw with highly coloured, short-sighted poignancy, was part of “a great unity.”64 Every detail had a local imprint produced in “the old unhurrying way,” with thick joints and no corners and the whole resting upon low coarse rubble. Morris’s Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire also came “out of the soil and the lives of those that lived on it.”65 Such an orientation resonated in many of McKay’s poems;“My Mountain Home,” for example, included in Songs of Jamaica, spoke to the same deep-felt need for place. There was no rustic cottage in the afterlife for the peasant farmer of this poem, only an irregular plot along a hillside amid De mango tree in yellow bloom, De pretty akee seed, De mammee where de John-to-whits come To have their daily feed. In this poem, McKay points out proudly that he was born “ ’mongst de bananafield an’ corn”—an allusion to the odd combination of roots and adaptability. Such a description empowered him, and it became his birthright and passport into the artistic world that Jekyll inhabited. Show you de place where I was born, Of which I am so proud, ’Mongst de banana-field an’ corn On a lone mountain-road. One Sunday marnin’ ’fo’ de hour Fe service-time come on, Ma say dat I be’n born to her Her little las’y son. McKay’s heart is “ebergreen” and infused with nature, the embodiment of a natural glow that Jekyll and Ruskin sought. “How I did lub my little wul’ / Surrounded by pingwin!” he goes on in “My Mountain Home.”The poet’s life is “neber dull”—and such a whole and vigorous existence would determine the kind of art he would make in his travels throughout the world. An’ growin’ up, with sweet freedom About de yard I’d run; An’ tired out I’d hide me from De fierce heat of de sun. So glad I was de fus’ day when Ma sent me to de spring;

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I was so happy feelin’ then Dat I could do somet’ing. But there was another side to McKay, and it was strangely off-register, in the language of this emerging, yet-unnamed country.Along with these rhymes of folk industry, there are more indicting, colonial allusions amid the mango trees “in yellow bloom” in “My Mountain Home,” as well as subtle gender shifts, as in confusion over “Her little las’y son.” There is also irony in the words “how I did lub my little wul’,” and the “little joys” that were “bullied” out of him. Natural boundaries were really only social ones in this new country. To become “a man,” for McKay in “My Mountain Home,” meant essentially to be among “strange folks in a strange lan’.” My little joys, my wholesome min’, Dey bullied out o’ me, And made me daily mourn an’ pine An’ wish dat I was free. Dey taught me to distrust my life, Dey taught me what was grief; For months I travailed in de strife, ’Fo’ I could find relief. Who or what are “dey” that have encouraged McKay to be distrustful of his native life? Are they the forces of modernity that inspired the Old Ploughman’s lament? McKay swiftly moves from a childhood image of serenity to a fractured parody of Shakespeare’s self-referential, soliloquizing Will in the Sonnets. This completes a literary cycle: Though older and more reflective of his “home” on Dawkin’s Hill, in “My Mountain Home” the poet promises his “Willie” that he will return.66 (This would be part of a restlessness that is resolved years later in Tangier.) But I’ll return again, my Will, An’ where my wild ferns grow An’ weep for me on Dawkin’s Hill, Dere,Willie, I shall go. An’ dere is somet’ing near forgot, Although I lub it best; It is de loved, de hallowed spot Where my dear mother rest. Look good an’ find it,Willie dear, See dat from bush ’tis free; Remember that my heart is near,

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An’ you say you lub me. An’ plant on it my fav’rite fern, Which I be’n usual wear; In days to come I shall return To end my wand’rin’s dere. This home, however, is never truly English, as Gertrude Jekyll’s is, though both McKay and Jekyll have now reached the same high ground. McKay, however, must still adapt because of economic and cultural desires and thus is continually at odds with the shape and angle of his beloved mountain retreat. But there is a curious convergence here. McKay moves out into this country precisely as Jekyll recedes into her Wood as modernity and war press in on her. The poet announces, soothingly, “I’ll return” to live on among “wild ferns.” And it is the solitary beauty of ferns that ultimately convinces the artistgardeners of McKay’s larger project in his pastoral. Around and above that contrived window frame, where one dwells contented in a glorious English heaven of Jekyll’s and McKay’s making, is a world half complete, half imagined. And it awaits, as if in a shadowed land. Modernism’s eventual dominance in art and design put an end to Gertrude Jekyll’s passion to merge the past and future, the local with the diasporic. Her efforts to hybridize the flora of her garden, like the Creole ambitions in McKay’s lyrics, were not particularly high, nationalistic, or useful—an ill fit against the more uniform ideological and aesthetic lines on the horizon. Jekyll, like the poet, saw herself as a rare flower amid the weeds—of materialism and crass prejudices. Not easily molded,“hardly ever sleek,” and “only occasionally functional.”67 On August 14, 1914, Jekyll closed the book on her garden romance with Old West Surrey.There were no more photos, no designs or wishes. Some whispered that it was her health and extreme near-sightedness; those who knew her cited “the war” and the steady march toward more vigilant borders and beds. Her eloquent Victorian retreat would be the beginning of the end for the wild, borderless imagination.68

C hap te r 5

The Voyage In My intention was to make a voyage or two, entirely to please these my honoured patrons; but I determined that the year following, if it pleased God, I would see Old England once more, and surprise my old Master. —Olaudah Equiano

Mckay waited until January 1920 before he sent a “letter of introduction” to C. K. Ogden, a Cambridge linguist, bibliophile, and editor, from the pacifist Walter Fuller, whom he met in America.1 An English poet and the lover of Crystal Eastman, herself a pacifist, Fuller wanted McKay— who had been working as a reporter and editor for Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Dreadnought in London’s gritty East End—to see, hear, and taste the real power of England, and what better person, he surmised, than a contemporary, close in age and equal in rebellion?2 It was Fuller’s letter that planted the seed of intrigue that would have lasting significance for postcolonial expression. “Mr. McKay,” Fuller informed his Cambridge friend,“is a poet of some distinction over here.”3 Charles Kay Ogden was known as the notorious “organizer of Heresy” around Magdalene College in Cambridge, and Fuller was confident that McKay would enjoy his company, as well as learn a bit about “deir solemn sacred beauty.” McKay’s work had already appeared in some of the leading U.S. journals—Seven Arts, under the pseudonym Eli Edwards, and Pearson’s magazine—and he had a bit of radical notoriety in his association with the Liberator, a left-leaning magazine that advocated women’s rights, peace, and racial justice.4 He was touted by the Messenger as a harbinger of a new black sensibility, more strident and bold, and he had settled into the aura of the Harlem Renaissance, penning verse that described the attraction of that locale. Consequently, McKay imagined that his time in England would be brief, a year at most, and then he would return to the United States. His reason for coming to England, the poet confided in a letter to Ogden dated March 12, 1920, was selfish. He wanted to see, firsthand, the beauty of that face—London—he had dreamed of for so long and to publish a chapbook 99

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of poems in the high style of “literary English” familiar from the love sonnets and Romantic lyrics that nurtured him in colonial Jamaica—not in the dialect of “Old England,” but in a new language that would intrigue Ogden as well. McKay felt a bit uneasy about using his radical credentials, which he had quickly acquired in New York, to satisfy his childhood fantasy. But if Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot could launch their careers in England, why not McKay, a true native son of the vast country?5 Fuller briefed the young poet on the rigors of his apprenticeship. It would be a unique experience, akin to the voyage in the eighteenth-century by the navigator Equiano, but on uncharted linguistic waters. Ogden, Fuller warned, was one of the brilliant contemporary minds in England, a member of a quirky group of talented Cambridge intellectuals infamous for all-night brainstorming sessions that usually included two other conspirators in revolt, I. A. Richards and James Wood.6 (This trio would go on to produce numerous collaborations on aesthetics, language, and art.) They were colleagues, as well, against academic uniformity, but foremost they were internationalists deeply opposed to the word magic of propaganda and war. Ogden’s art gallery and bookshop, which he opened at the start of World War I, were incendiary meeting places for pacifists and internationalists such as Crystal Eastman and raised concerns among the college’s establishment.7 These restless intellectuals were of McKay’s generation—young, gay, and anarchic. They formed their own societies, such as the Heretics, and published journals like the Cambridge Magazine.8 Ogden’s “top hole,” a book-cluttered attic above a fish factory, became their alternate university, and their meetings lasted into the wee hours of the night on issues ranging from academic reform to civil liberties and internationalism.9 These so-called Heretics were willing “to accept and welcome every point of view” and spiritedly worked at chopping away at the prevailing prejudices—and wisdom—of the age like busy cultural beavers. Ogden, a demure bespectacled bibliophile, possessed a remarkable talent for persuading the most unconvinced to reject “all appeal to Authority.”10 Such were the convictions of a generation against the prevailing English traditions and their own class comforts and privilege. Ogden saw his work in terms of a global paradigm that involved changes in the perception of colonization, modern communication, and culture. He called his system Basic English,“the language of Radio,” of Africa, even of U.S. business.11 “It ought then to cause no [more] surprise than it does that how we think should depend upon how we use symbols,” declared Ogden and Richards. Language was perceived in terms of “sign situations” which are themselves indeterminate and fluid, more about probability than about the actual event or referent. “It is plainly symbols which are probable, never

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events,” Ogden and Richards noted.12 The importance of this is that hardly anything is understood—or what one means to say—particularly across cultures. Hence the need for a linguistic structure of “debabelization.” They called their movement “symbolism”—not to be confused with its French counterpart—and this became the theory behind Basic English, a call for a new language based upon a collapsing empire of numerous diasporas and degrees of colonialism, mobility, and exile.Although Ogden and Richards initially hoped that this “ideal language,” as they called it, would be a magical divining rod for gauging the faults of existing languages, they soon imagined themselves verbal wordsmiths retiring warlike and gender-biased syntax. Was Claude McKay to be the first poet of Basic English rather than of the diaspora? At the moment, for McKay and Ogden at least, those two worlds seemed temperamentally contiguous.13 Their concern with language meaning developed into a theory, “word magic,” which they used in analyzing the subtle effects of propaganda in everyday life.Their approach was to limit word usage and thus, they believed, prevent misunderstanding.There can be no “formal apparatus of Canons and Rules, no demands that abuses of language shall be reformed,” they pointed out, “until the habits that enable language to be freely used are developed.”14 Making us aware of the allure of words, Ogden eventually realized, reverses a history of linguistic brutality in which “men have been so impressed by the properties of words as instruments for the control of objects, that they in every age attributed to them occult power.” The best way to promote universal brotherhood and sisterhood, Ogden decided, was to enlist “about 1,000 more dead languages—and one more alive.”15 Ogden, however, was keenly focused on the past, like McKay and other internationalists, and continued the work of Victorians who had explored the relationship among language, meaning, and culture.16 One of those interests involved Victoria Lady Welby, a self-taught philologist and goddaughter of Queen Victoria, who viewed language in terms of significs, the forerunner of semiotics.17 Like Ogden and Richards, she was concerned with the seduction of language, which she believed is ultimately shaped by one’s perceptions.18 But it was Welby’s views on the social responsibility of language, what she called “linguistic conscience,” that ultimately intrigued Ogden, the pacifist.19 “The mutual deafness, dumbness and blindness which is the mental condition of our ‘Modern Babel,’ ” she pointed out, was the cause of war.And she added:“Few things indeed would be likely to do more to further the prospects of universal peace” than the improvement of language “between all civilized nations.”20 That Welby published late in life, with her most important work appearing when she was in her seventies, did not deter Ogden.This elegant Victorian with regal connections became the centerpiece of his revolt against the sine qua non of modernism.21 But this new language was a way to overcome another divide, that of

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cultural inequity—to make feelings and thoughts, without jargon and charged syntax, accessible to all, in and out of the colonies. It seemed that Ogden’s new interests arose when he moved to London and met McKay, who had made the Jamaican dialect accessible to modern English readers.22 Ogden wanted a usable language that reflected the hybridity of the changing dynamic of cultures and languages in the Caribbean,Africa, the United States, and Asia. He was less concerned, as he wrote in a preface to James Joyce’s Tales Told of Shem and Shaun, with modern notions of “the perseveration of Print, the authority of the Authorised Version, the convenience of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, the standardization of the English Public Schools, and the exigencies of Fleet Street.” He also wanted a less self-conscious language that worked in opposition to modernist verse. This, he believed, would eliminate subterfuge, misunderstanding, and the potential for violence and exploitation, particularly in the colonies. Ogden saw little difference between expatriates from Europe and England and colonials in exile.They were all part of what he viewed as an ideology of the environmental, in which someone like Joyce, “though he can write standard English and lives in Paris, is neither an Englishman nor a Parisian.” Few at the time had the brilliant sweep of vision that connected McKay’s “bent” English to Joyce’s “Mackenzie dialect.” Ogden’s description of the Irish novelist as “the bellwether of debabelization” and the “promised liquidator” of “the machinery of literature”—“clogged by the ministrations and minutiae of an ossified propaedeutic”—applied to the colonial’s own linguistic experiments in either dialect or Creole.23 As Ogden explained:“One is forced when keeping to the apparatus of this form of the English language [that is, Basic English] to take more care than one commonly does to make the dark and complex thoughts that are at the back of one’s mind as clear and simple as possible.”24 Ogden realized that Basic was ideally suited to “those whose natural language is not English,” such as McKay, and what was acquired in those migrations from Jamaica to the United States and England added “considerably to the interest of his work.” It also helped, in no small way, to further revolutionize the English language.25 In fact, Ogden believed, the cultural spaces that buffered the periphery of empire—the borderlands and rim cultures; the diasporas of Asia, India, and Africa—were uniquely poised for such an innovation in language, since the English standard was hopelessly fixed and archaic.26 He noted with a bit of irony:“In order to keep the English as they are, with their ideas preserved, it is necessary to keep them from learning of language which they would speak in common.”27 McKay’s poems, Ogden thought, more accurately reflected the sights and texture of those cultural “gaps” and might be put to use as a vehicle for this new language. Ogden wrote:“Today, with the entire Pacific area, to say nothing of India and Africa, in the forefront of the international picture, we can no longer regard a fully inflected system of European roots as an international solution.”28 The poet’s verse became a key element in Ogden’s overall strategy to

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reform a language that was, he believed, insular and Eurocentric. In effect, he would decolonize the dominant ideology that espoused war and imperialism. Such works as McKay’s verse would act as linguistic radar for detecting “word magic.” This subject was the footing of frequent meetings between Ogden and McKay in the months from February to October 1920. Ogden helped McKay understand the allure of this word magic, which, like the language of academicians, was fraught with “false problems.” (The allure was particularly inviting for a colonial writer prone to emulate English bad habits, Ogden was convinced, and he understood the complication for McKay in terms of racial identity, or rather the fiction of one’s racial orientation.) Ogden felt obliged to show McKay the way (as had Jekyll and Olivier) toward a middle approach to true Englishness, to lighten up that imperial mantle, and to defuse it of word magic.29 This connection also answered Ogden’s deep-seated need for rebellion, and he felt satisfied when this exciting new poetry challenged those very same “old men” at Cambridge whose “tyranny of grammatical good form” had kept things so dull for so long.30 Such tyranny would soon end, Ogden pronounced:“It seemed obvious to us that here was no ordinary set of verses.” “Do we not send expeditions to strange parts to hunt for the dusky, bosky art-products of Hoo-Doo and Voodoo? Are there not literary critics in universities who maintain that without a knowledge of the classics our noble English language cannot be writ? Have we not Schools of English to show that three years on top of ten are necessary for the acquisition of a style? Yet here was the mountain come to Mahomet, a Daniel come to the lion’s den for judgment.”31 The moment seemed ripe for putting Ogden’s words into action. It was a topic argued in Welby’s day, and by the turn of the century, many on both sides of the Atlantic were convinced that “English was worn out.” Some, such as London literary critic Edmund Grosse, believed that poetry was at the forefront of the necessary reform. It was, he explained, most likely to reflect other “languages which have been subjected to less wear and tear—languages which have not so extensive and complicated a literature and in which simple things can still be said without affectation and without repetition.”32 Ogden restated those concerns: There are those who maintain that the present parlous plight of poetry in this country is due chiefly to the state into which criticism has fallen during the past few years. The recognised organs of literary comment, it is often said, have either lapsed or passed into the hands of cliques, and unless the aspiring poet has taken care to join one or another of the mutual admiration societies which set the standard, and whose own works are barely distinguishable either in form or content, he is not likely to get further in print than he can in MS.33

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McKay was no mere theoretical backdrop, however, and Ogden seemed to appreciate the time he spent with the poet.They cultivated a special relationship over the course of nine months, meeting several times a week to discuss poetry and aesthetics, taking in museums, dining at various clubs, and occasionally traveling to the countryside. Ogden had a poetic spirit, rebelliousness, and iconoclasm that matched McKay’s own restlessness. In their late twenties, they shared a passion for the Romantics, nightclubs, and nocturnal adventure— and the intrigue of “impersonations” that had the potential of many sexual and racial crossings. Ogden, however, was diligent in his friendship with McKay, believing that it would help in his understanding of this acquired Englishness—the very key to modern, postcolonial linguistic meaning. So when Ogden encountered McKay in London in 1920, the time was ripe to move from theory and the provincialism of Cambridge.34 Ogden found the anonymity of London a much-needed break from his notoriety as a “Heretic.” He fell in with the 1917, a relaxed and sophisticated club near his Soho flat that catered to the eccentricities of the Bloomsbury group.The club attracted the political outcasts of London as well, a group to which Ogden, by temperament, seemed drawn. And it was a transit point for U.S. radicals, such as Crystal Eastman, on their way to or from Europe.35 Soon the 1917 became McKay’s and Ogden’s favorite meeting place. Ogden was curious to know, in those encounters with McKay, how the “acquired language” that characterized McKay’s literary style migrated from one locale to another—its porosity and adaptability, its texture and rhythm. Such scrutiny of his style was hardly unusual for McKay, who was trained as an interlocutor and skilled at translating island ways and rhymes for popular consumption. His reputation was as the “Bobby Burns” of Jamaican folk wisdom, who could write persuasive “love songs” in a sonorous dialect. But an exasperated McKay explained to Ogden:“One can’t express any deep thought to perfection in it, nor can it effectively bring forth the note of sorrow.” Dialect was hackneyed, McKay concluded. “I’ve buried it and don’t care to revive it again.”36 Ogden was sympathetic to the poet’s desires to internationalize his poetics, and he mentored him in precision and exactness—de-emotionalizing his lyrics of the charged baggage of Harlem and race.37 Much of the verse that McKay brought to England comprised pieces he had written in New Hampshire, where he worked at a resort, and in New York, and a few of his dialect poems written in the language of horticulture. But as the editing progressed, he added lyrics and love ballads composed in London.Thus was the beginning of decolonization so crucial to this new sensibility. “Without dogmatism or any direct method you have shown me the key in which I should do my best work,” McKay explained to Ogden at the end of his brief stay in London.“It has been a great experience for I now feel that I have a sound standard for artistic endeavor.”38 But titling the collection

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posed problems. McKay was opposed to Spring in New Hampshire, and Other Poems; he believed the title conjured associations with New England, which he felt was “played out.”39 Ogden, however, saw connections with a more lasting lyrical tradition in synch with the New England of Robert Frost, as well as with others who had made a voyage to London, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Frost arrived in 1913 to publish his first book of verse, A Boy’s Will, and Pound came in 1908 to write and edit the Blast. Regardless of what Frost’s reputation might be today, his first attempts at poetry were quite favorably received by Ezra Pound and other modernists who were living in England at the time. Ogden also made other crucial comparisons: He saw in Frost’s A Boy’s Will, but also in his North of Boston (1914) and the poem “New Hampshire,” similarities to McKay’s island pastoral.40 This was unheard of among Anglo editors, who were inclined to see all colonials as exotics. McKay preferred “a terse, simple thing” for a title, such as “Poems or Verse,” which Ogden, too, appreciated. But McKay also had an eye for the New York—and Harlem—reading public. He suggested “Dawn in New York,” invoking imagery that would ultimately give texture to Harlem Shadows in 1922.41 Ogden persisted in his claims for the high lyricism of Frost, and eventually McKay came around to that aesthetic ground. (The choice of title, Spring in New Hampshire, was, as McKay acknowledged, a bold move for a poet who would very soon represent the Harlem Renaissance.)42 Over the course of the summer, the aesthetic concerns of Ogden and McKay began to merge, transparently and almost effortlessly, much as Basic English was supposed to layer upon the dominant language.43 While the poet collaborated with Ogden in the evenings and on weekends, he worked at the Workers’ Dreadnought, the radical newspaper edited by the well-known suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst, as a reporter and editor at a salary that barely paid the rent.44 Still, he was given extraordinary editorial freedom. His job was to interpret “foreign newspapers from America, India, Australia and other parts of the British Empire,” especially, he liked to point out, from places where “imperialism got drunk and went wild among the native peoples.”45 He was also able to publish his poems. The relationship worked for McKay.“The association with Pankhurst put me in the nest of extreme radicalism in London,” he wrote, though that nest was quite familiar and exciting.46 What impressed McKay was Pankhurst’s independence. “The other male-controlled radical groups,” he explained, “were quite hostile to the Pankhurst group and its rather hysterical militancy.”47 But McKay seemed comfortable with that hysteria, perhaps because many of his radical companions in England and the United States were suffragists or freespirited anarchists of one hue or another, such as Emma Goldman. McKay’s poems debuted on September 6, 1919, in the Dreadnought and were a pleasant greeting upon his landfall in October on a merchant vessel

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that disembarked at Cardiff. All the poems—“The Barrier,” “After the Winters,”“The Little Peoples,”“A Roman Holiday,” and “If We Must Die”—were reprinted from the July issue of the Liberator.48 (Crystal Eastman, the managing editor of the Liberator, also wanted to see McKay’s desires as an English poet fulfilled and may have suggested the poems to Pankhurst, whom she knew through the suffrage internationalist pacifist network. She was also impressed by Ogden’s credentials as a male suffragist and pacifist.) McKay was introduced to his English readers, many of whom were unfamiliar with his horticultural verse, as “a Negro of Jamaica” whose exciting experiences abroad were those of “a waiter in an American dining car.” Pankhurst, it seemed, like Ogden, played the willing host to McKay and helped convey the poet’s extraordinary “set of verses” to another group of sympathetic readers in England. (Although McKay enjoyed the East End of London, where the Dreadnought had its offices, and had spent many a night with suffragist and other radical lesbian women, much of his time was devoted to revising his poems for the book.) During their off-hours, Ogden and McKay became traveling companions, tasting the best London had to offer: the African and Egyptian rooms at the British Museum, Cézanne, and the 1917 club. McKay particularly appreciated Cézanne, but few of his contemporaries in London seemed interested in the colonial view of European art; Ogden was the exception. McKay commented on “the atmosphere” of one of the pictures, the “forest blue” and the “golden green of the banks,” as though the sun were shining through the leaves, and explained his point of reference—Jamaica.49 This only confirmed Ogden’s belief that an aesthetic—much in the way of linguistic meaning—is shaped by one’s position to it. In an essay that appeared in the summer 1920 issue of Cambridge Magazine, James Wood, who shared this view, explained what the intent of modern art should be. In perceiving it, “a new quality is recognized”—or “an old one in guise.”These perceptions are then consolidated and synthesized, much as McKay reimagines Jamaica upon seeing a Cézanne or adapts conventional literary tropes to express a Jamaican (even diasporic) sense of the pastoral. “There is not an artificial mentality to be created—it is to the same beauty-loving faculty that appeal is made but from a new quarter,” remarked Wood. The modern painter, he went on, “endows the subject with life, bringing the onlooker into direct personal contact with that for which he is searching.” Such an artist works, for the most part, “not through likenesses or elevations to scale, but through complicated patterns and rhythms, the fine balance of tones, the contrast of dark against light, and colour blended like sounds in music not copied or matched from nature.” Much, indeed, seemed dependent on perspective and orientation; and it is this synthesis and symbiotic relationship between the art and its reception that creates its becoming.50

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Art, then, like language, is a symbolic rearranging of experiences and becomes about appropriation and, as Hall would admit, reappropriation. Wood and McKay depart from the established way of interpreting art reflected in the opinions of Roger Fry, one of the foremost critics of the time, who stressed the importance of analyzing the formal qualities of a work of art. (Such “analysis” would give way to the New Critics of the 1950s and the importance of arduous close readings.) Wood, however, believed that art required little struggle, and if one does struggle, it is like pushing at a door that “opens inward.”51 It is a symbiotic relationship in which viewer and art are equally transformed, much like a reader who encounters McKay’s verse. McKay, Ogden, and Wood were also horrified by those in the artistic and literary worlds who were closing ranks with the dominant ideology of reactionary high modernism.52 McKay, however, did not see the solution as simply a change in governments, the goal of many radicals at the 1917 club and elsewhere.53 The problems were pervasive, whether in England, the United States, or Europe—an attitude found among the rich as well as the poor. While espousing an “armchair” revolution, those same activists, McKay stated bluntly, were sedated with “cheap and raw materials by the slaves of Asia and Africa for the industries of their overcrowded cities.”54 What McKay really resented were the “class-conscious” bohemians who held him to a higher standard. His skin color or colonial upbringing did not entitle him to a revolutionary’s life, any more than it gave radicals the excuse to sermonize. In fact, this moral high ground was increasingly carved out by the more pragmatic and uncommitted of London’s radical set. In those polemical confrontations, McKay preferred a club on Drury Lane that catered to “colored men, chiefly demobilised soldiers,” which had a mix of “West Indian and American and African, Negroes and Mulattoes, Egyptians, and Arabs and a few Indians.” Many were military veterans induced to fight a war that would, ironically, only help solidify their colonial status.55 At least McKay understood their predicament, which was so similar to his own. He also understood that these two worlds between which he moved would never reach an understanding—at least for the present. He later explained to Nancy Cunard: “I hate oppression of subject races and peoples, because it either emasculates the oppressed or diverts the energy they should pour into artistic and cultural channels into political propaganda and struggles for independence. This, changed a little, could also sum up my attitude towards class struggle and revolution.”56 McKay also was aware of the destruction of nature, from his childhood memories of deforestation in Jamaica. While other lands were denuded, the “broad, fertile acres of Great Britain” continued to be inaccessible to the masses, preserved for “hunting and other questionable pleasures.” Empire’s break up, as he learned from Fabian socialists such as Olivier, was not neces-

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sarily a bad thing all around. “Some English Communists have remarked to me,” McKay commented in an essay that appeared in the Dreadnought, “that they have no real sympathy for the Irish or Indian movement because it is nationalistic. But today, the British Empire is the greatest obstacle to International Socialism, and any of its subjugated parts succeeding in breaking away from it would be helping the cause of World Communism.”57 Frustrated, McKay suggested meeting with Ogden at the International Club and Institute, which had the feel of “a little piece of foreign territory on English soil.”58 The club was loud and brawling,“full of excitement, with dogmatists and doctrinaires of radical left ideas,” with none of the “conveniences for private talk” that were readily available at the 1917 club. But if one was looking for engagement, as those two intellectuals might be, there were always “group discussions of social problems.” McKay was taken with some of the “outstanding interesting personalities,” and he surmised that his mentor might appreciate them too. There were, for instance, an array of “street corner orators, British members of the I.W.W., wartime prisoners, deportees from America, proletarian poets and certain individuals who were suspected of being spies and agents-provocateurs”—a cross-section of the disenfranchised.59 McKay seemed to understand Ogden, an outsider like himself. He knew that the editor was up for the adventure. During his stay in London, McKay in fact became a genial host to such English radicals and intellectuals as Ogden and Pankhurst, self-conscious that their Englishness had been played out. He was their guide into London’s “sordid” (a term McKay used with exaggerated sarcasm) diasporas and places where students from Africa and the Caribbean, Bolsheviks and sailors, restless immigrants and intellectuals, the high and the low, converged. He played this role of go-between throughout his life, to political, sexual, and literary advantage. He engaged Ogden, however, as a more sophisticated pilot and navigator, inviting him seductively to various hangouts and art shows at the International Club.60 In those meetings, unstated homosexual gaps, fears of surveillance or harassment textured their relationship. Once, McKay scribbled on the top of a letter:“The R.I.D. have been haunting the Club as [of ] late. . . . Certain clever young criminals are using it as a rendezvous to disguise their activities. I don’t want my name mixed up in any of this”; and he gave a temporary address.61 Ogden seemed genuinely worried whenever he didn’t hear from McKay, or uncomfortable when the poet described one of his many harrowing London adventures. Ogden, however, understood McKay’s restlessness and his “mania for wandering,” since he himself enjoyed working through the night and taking early-morning strolls to clear his head. But for a black man in London in the post–World War I years, such head clearing was quite dangerous. This undercurrent of anxiety textured their discussions of Benin sculptures or Cézanne landscapes. Yet McKay surmised that Ogden found the youthful,

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though dangerous, fringe just as exciting and transgressive as he did himself: For both, it was a place where the sexual (and “passing strange,” as he called it) met the political.62 It was during one such stroll around London, however, deep in a political debate with a companion, that McKay discovered the brute power and beauty of that English face he so badly desired his entire life. He was walking home from the Socialist Club with a young Serbian friend when a drunken South African soldier came up to him, slurring into his face as if he were “from Basutoland or some other place” and holding McKay by his tie. McKay struggled free and roundly socked the hulking South African, proving that George Bernard Shaw was right: Poets do have the stuff of pugilists, especially if they don’t have an empire, as Rudyard Kipling did, to rally behind them.63 That English face that had so enticed McKay in youth seemed now, in this ultramodern age, merely brutish and swarthy.64 As the newly titled Spring in New Hampshire took on a life of its own, a generous sampling of verse was previewed in the summer issue of Cambridge Magazine, edited and with an introduction by Ogden. Many of those poems—later included in the book, which was reprinted in the United States as Harlem Shadows in 1922—have the gentle rock of sea change, as the lyrics moved from New York to London. O! I hear the waters falling, Flowing, falling, flowing free, And the sound of voices calling O’er the billows of the sea.65 Only “The Barrier” had been published earlier, in the Liberator and Dreadnought; the rest were original, and included “Tropics in New York,” “The Lynching,” and “Spanish Needle”—poems that would make McKay’s reputation later as a Harlem Renaissance writer. Some began as lyrics in New Hampshire and others were written around 1918, “the period of the war,” when the poet lived in New York. A few, which he called “love songs,” composed after he arrived in London, represented a liberating change for the poet, who cherished the time spent with Ogden as his apprenticeship in English poetry. McKay’s debut in Cambridge Magazine, however, was part of a wellplanned revolt against an academic wall of silence and closed ranks. Virginia Woolf had characterized the ludicrously robed Cambridge dons whom Ogden rebelled against as “creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium.”66 As early as 1912, Ogden had advocated for a more gender-friendly educational setting “where the academic or political

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exclusiveness of the existing institutions is avoided.” The Heretics, founded soon afterward, had the active recruitment of women as “equal members of the Society and its government” as its top priority, to the annoyance of many Cambridge locals.“Oxford, Cambridge and the Church alone deny the principle of equal opportunity and keep women in a position of Pauline subjection,” remarked one contributor, Eileen Powers.67 The appearance of McKay’s poems would show that the colonial can also write back—and write back well. “Our present contents speak for themselves,” Ogden boasted in his editorial in the June 1920 issue, and he was quite excited to include a poet who he believed would challenge the snobbish literary machinery of the age. It was now time to bring those poems and ideas on language and coeducation to a more diverse intellectual audience, Ogden felt. The “Writing on the Wall,” he explained coolly, “has removed the necessity of any further local barrage against those particular forms of gnarled necrophily which have regarded the academic universe as an eternal preserve of intransigent gerontocracy.” He hoped that “some of the seeds may fall on good ground,” and in this way, “we shall not have to start more new shops and call on the law of the land to see to it that the old men do not do us in.”68 Although Ogden and McKay held similar political views, they differed on other issues.While Ogden looked for exactness, transparency, moments of overlap, and plasticity, McKay wanted identity and emotion. For instance, McKay was used to editorial choices based on racial sentimentalism rather than on aesthetics, fine literary nuance, or even that tenuous thing called lyricism. Ogden’s perspective was both exciting and a refreshing challenge. But it was also frustrating. “Perhaps,” McKay once suggested to his editor about Spring in New Hampshire, “I was unable to make you feel that I really wanted the bad stuff eliminated rather than sandwiched between the good. But I am sincere about it.”69 In profound ways, McKay had to undo a lot of the ideas about literary style that he had picked up in the United States from William Stanley Braithwaite, Frank Harris, and Max Eastman. Essentially, he was forced to rethink the very notion of modern. What Ogden insisted on was originality, and he frowned upon “racial things”—the poems that contributed to McKay’s identity in the United States as a notorious Negro poet. “The Barrier,” so Blake-like in its concerns, was more to Ogden’s liking; it used language that made racial understatements without the markings of cliché, as did “The Lynching,” which follows, included in Spring in New Hampshire: 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

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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. In this poem and elsewhere, Ogden was firm on eliminating the power and seduction of word magic. He continually challenged McKay when the question of race surfaced.70 In one moment of guilt, however, McKay admitted that “If We Must Die,” “White Fiends,” and others “were thrown off in a white heat.” He offered “Exhortation” and “Rest in Peace” in their place. But “Exhortation,” for example, though less heated, lacked the poetic grace of “The Lynching”: Through the pregnant universe rumbles life’s terrific thunder And Earth’s bowels quake with terror; strange and terrible storms break, Lightning-torches flame the heavens, kindling souls of men thereunder: Africa! Long ages sleeping, Oh my motherland, awake!71 Ogden may have been appalled by the jargon of “pregnant universe,” “Earth’s bowels,” and “kindling souls.” In such a word muddle, the orientation—in this case, Africa—gets shrouded.72 Over time, Ogden and McKay began filing poems according to either their magic qualities or their dependency on what Welby would have called “habitual thinking.”“You’re right to put [“Exhortation”] in the propaganda group,” McKay wrote to Ogden, “but don’t you think it has more of poetry than any? When I wrote it I felt the march of the rhythm like martial music and I still have the same feeling in thinking about it. For me it overshadows all the rest.”73 There was a very serious and reputation-threatening reason for including in Spring in New Hampshire such poems as “Black Fiend” and “White Fiend,” or “If We Must Die” and “Pariahs,” McKay pointed out.The pairings were part of that discourse of the talking poems, the argumentative two minds of Olivier, and they complemented each other. But more to the point, he explained: “From purely racial motives, I shouldn’t like to publish the two you have chosen [“White Fiend” and “Pariahs”] without the others.You would understand why if you had lived in America and tasted the poison of hatred.” U.S. “coloured opinion” won’t relish it, he said. “Pariahs,” on the other hand, had “the note of despair” that was offset by “If We Must Die.”74

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McKay agreed with Ogden that some of the poems written in the United States were too mired in habitual language.“I have been comparing those that you’ve passed and those that you’ve failed,” he finally admitted of their slowly evolving aesthetics, soon after one meeting, “and I see clearly where many of the latter are far below the average standard.” McKay sent another batch, this time of six love songs written in London;“others are of the period of the war, some before.”75 Ogden was taken with the simplicity of the recently worked lyrics, such as “Morning Joy,” a type of ode: At night the wide and level stretch of wold Which at high noon had basked in quiet gold, Far as the eye could see was ghostly white; Dark was the night save for the snow’s weird light. I drew the shades far down, crept into bed; Hearing the cold wind moaning over head Through the sad pines, my soul, catching its pain, Went sorrowing with it across the plain. At dawn behold! The pall of night was gone Save where a few shrubs melancholy, lone, Detained part of its shadow. Gold-lipped The laughing grasses heaven’s sweet wine sipped. The sun rose smiling o’er the river’s Breast, And my soul, by his happy spirit blest, Soared like a bird to greet him in the sky And drew out of his heart Eternity. Ogden also approved of the elusive “To O.E.A,” which is reminiscent of the Jamaican love ballads McKay wrote during the time he studied with Jekyll: Your voice is the colour of a robin’s breast, And there’s a sweet sob in it like rain—still rain in the night. Among the leaves of the trumpet-tree, close to his nest, The pea-dove sings, and each note thrills me with strange delight Like the words, wet with music, that well from your trembling throat. I’m afraid of your eyes, they’re so bold, Searching me through, reading my thoughts, shining like gold. But sometimes they are gentle and soft like the dew on the lips of the eucharis Before the sun comes warm with his lover’s kiss, You are sea-form, pure with the star’s loveliness, Not mortal, a flower, a fairy, too fair for the beauty-shorn earth, All wonderful things, all beautiful things, gave of their wealth to your birth:

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O I love you so much, not recking the passion, that I feel it is wrong But men will love you, flower, fairy, non-mortal spirit burdened with flesh, Forever, life-long.76 McKay felt confident about the creative outpouring that had taken place in London and was sure that Ogden would like a recent work, “La Paloma in London,” for its lustful spirit.“I prefer it to any of the lot,” he explained confidently, before passing it on to Ogden. He asked timidly, however:Would “vault” work as a substitute for “sky”? And if you omit “above,” can you still maintain “good English”? 77 Ogden, though, seemed repulsed at the imitative borrowings from modernists—new humanists such as T. S. Eliot and others, whom he had an antipathy toward—in McKay’s writing of those exotic and contrived “palomas” that inexplicably appear from shadowy casements.Yet McKay’s version is different from the modernists’. In McKay’s poem, the hard, anonymous press of a Harlem dance floor shadows, even in London, the soft love-image of a Cuban woman in exile. The moment is fractured by the “low guitar” of La Paloma, a jarring figure amid the gay revelers, as they party into the night. About Soho we went before the light; We went, unresting six, craving new fun, New Scenes, new raptures for the fevered night Of rollicking laughter, drink and song, was done. The vault was void, but the dawn’s great star That shed upon our path its silver flame. When La Paloma on a low guitar abruptly from a darkened casement came.— Harlem! All else a blank, I saw the hall, And you in your red shoulder sash come dancing With Val, against me careless by the wall, Your burning coffee-colored eyes keen glancing Aslant at mine, proud in your golden glory! I loved you, Cuban girl, fond sweet Diory. Ogden’s objections to the poem might have had to do with his own scrupulously guarded identity, which he was known to deconstruct periodically.78 Can La Paloma be one of those disguises of Ogden’s complex persona, revealed in a flash of seduction as he abruptly emerges from the “darkened casement”? Or might McKay’s highlighting of Ogden in the poem anchor a new artistic aesthetic and inspiration? Ogden had numerous eccentricities, some that McKay found extremely distressing. One that puzzled him at first was the editor’s insistence on referring

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to McKay’s verse as written in an acquired language.“About the introductory note,” McKay remarked, “don’t you think if you write acquired it might mislead people into thinking that I was Spanish- or French-speaking West Indian.” (McKay was correct in his doubt, and this was one of the instances where Ogden’s theory butted up against praxis.) Even a mention of dialect or of a native version of English would be less confusing, McKay added. He was an oral poet, he boasted, and his language already had a “natural rhythm.” So what was acquired? His language now needed only refinement. His English already possessed a “melody of dialect,” he insisted to Ogden. He told of his exchanges with West Indian soldiers at the Drury Club, which gave him “a strange, pleasant sensation as of regaining some precious thing long lost.”What piqued Ogden’s curiosity was McKay’s mentioning that his dialect had, in fact, changed in the course of his travels, becoming in the process remarkably resilient and acquistional. “What I gained in America was more a polishing up and refinement of my own language,” he told Ogden, “chiefly by listening— reading too—and comparing the American idiom with ours.”79 McKay’s view of language as oral and Ogden’s more theoretical paradigm seemed to come together—briefly. But there were disagreements over so-called borrowings from that oral tradition, and McKay became increasingly defensive, especially when Ogden returned his verse with marks that alluded to “echoes of other singers.”Was he to take this as a compliment or a rebuke? Didn’t Ogden appreciate the use of other voices, symbols, and meaning in undermining an authorial presence, which was so much the gist of Ogden’s collaborations? Wasn’t this a part of that larger acquisition? “I am sending them back,” the poet declared,“with the hope that you might think a little better of them.”80 Ogden was not referring to the importance of the vernacular in McKay’s poems, however, but to bad European influences. McKay had deliberately borrowed from Ernest Dowson’s “Cynara” in a “finishing couplet” to the poem “Sukee River,” which he reworked, with Ogden’s help, from a ballad to a sonnet, and which was among the poems he returned to Ogden. McKay at this time relied upon the style and meter of fin de siècle poets such as Dowson, whose ode to faithfulness in “Cynara”—“I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! In my fashion”—McKay inverted to faithlessness in “Sukee River.”81 But it is a stylistic move, for how can someone be faithless to a river? Ogden felt that McKay was compromising his originality by alluding to Dowson’s lyric.82 Yet this unique inverting of the traditional love object makes McKay’s a richer, more complicated poem. It becomes doubled, working at two frequencies— within a Victorian tradition as well as a colonial sensibility. This movement might have jarred Ogden. In effect,“Sukee River,” included in Constab Ballads, is an example of McKay’s acquisitional style, as it moves in temperament from ballad to sonnet form, the country to the city:

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Thou sweet-voiced stream that first gavest me drink, Watched o’er me when I floated on thy breast, What black-faced boy gambols on thy brink, Or finds beneath thy rocks a place of rest? What naked lad doth linger long by thee, And run and tumble in the sun-scorched sand, Or heed the pea-dove in the wild fig tree, While I am roaming in an alien land? No wonder that my heart is happy never, I have been faithless to thee, Sukee River. When from my early wandering I returned, Did I not promise to remain for ye? Yet instantly for other regions yearned And wearied of thee in a single day. Thy murmurs sound now in my anguished ears, Creating in my heart a world of pain; I see thee wistful flowing down the years And though I pine, afar I must remain: No wonder that my feet are faltering ever, I have been faithless to thee, Sukee River. Though other boys may frolic by thy side, I know their merry moods thou dost not heed When I, O mother of my soul and bride, Lie on strange breasts and on strange kisses feed. Sometimes, kind fate permitting me, I dream I am floating on thy bosom of deep blue, A child again, beloved, unchanging stream; But soon I wake to find it all untrue: I vowed that never, never would we sever, But I’ve been faithless to thee, Sukee River. The poem seems to parody Dowson and the trope of the tortured Victorian lover, much as “If We Must Die” parodies Brooke’s English mercenary. How can the love of Sukee ever come close to that of a full-bodied paramour?83 While Dowson writes that he has been faithful to Cynara “in my fashion,” McKay wants no part of such dishonesty. He’s been faithless, he admits, in his trans-Atlantic adventures, and he offers up no excuses.Yet these touches of word play and doubleness are lost in a U.S. version of “Sukee River” that appeared in 1953. The poem is transformed into two disjointed—and antithetical— stanzas.The first ends with the inverted Dowson finishing couplet: Thou sweet-voiced stream that first gavest me drink, Watched o’er me when I floated on thy breast,

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What black-faced boy gambols on thy brink, Or finds beneath thy rocks a place of rest? What naked lad doth linger long by thee, And run and tumble in the sun-scorched sand, Or heed the pea-dove in the wild fig tree, While I am roaming in an alien land? No wonder that my heart is happy never, I have been faithless to thee, Sukee River. The other stanza moves, disconcertingly, to the ballad form, resembling the last stanza of the 1912 version. It is an interesting splicing of sensibilities, but one done posthumously and apparently without the author’s consent. I shall love you ever Dearest Sukee River: Dash against my broken heart, Nevermore from you I’ll part, But will I stay forever, Crystal Sukee River. This version not only elides McKay’s anxieties over his faithlessness, but also omits the poem’s finely honed parodic qualities against an English tradition. This streamlined version, which seemed tailored for quick consumption, stumbles between two spliced sensibilities. One of McKay’s English love songs that appealed to Ogden was “Flowers of Passion,” a piece about love and desire on the dance floor, a motif that runs throughout McKay’s verse. This poem is written in the simple style of a Jamaican ballad, reminiscent of the poet’s Creole romances. Now, however, the romance is entangled in the abandonment of one love (possibly Jamaica or England, Ogden or Jekyll) for another. Like “La Paloma,” the poem is disarmed of racial magic in its move to London, and we are able to see a rich inner life. McKay believed that intellectual ideas came together and were resolved on this dance floor; it was a site of dialectical synthesis, a place where the sexual and racial collide with the cultural and social. In England, the texture of those boundaries is more porous, unlike the “serried, sable wall” fashioned out of compromise by U.S. race leaders such as Booker T. Washington. In this space, cabarets and much of everything else that relate to race are “mortared” by “tact and power.”84 Again, one wonders if the “flowers” in “Flowers of Passion,” which follows, relate to Ogden or to McKay’s Jamaican mentor, Walter Jekyll—or simply to the poet’s own androgynous desires in the aftermath of an anonymous encounter on the floor. At one point in assembling the poems for Spring in New Hampshire, which would include “Flowers of Passion,” he reminded Ogden: “I am primitive, restless, impatient, with a flair

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for beautiful things.”85 Had McKay in mind those rarified intellects as the “beautiful things” he so desired? The dancers have departed, dear, And the last song has been sung; The red-stained glasses mock my gaze. And the fiddle lies unstrung. And I’m alone, alone once more, Save for your sweet brown face That comes reproachfully to me In this unholy place. I’ve kissed a thousand flowers, my own, Gone drunk with their perfume; But found out, when the madness passed, You were the one pure bloom. I’ve come to realize at last How awful it may be To cut adrift from sacred ties And be completely free. But life grows many flowers, my love, Within its garden wall, And Passion’s are the strangest And the deadliest of all. The poem is an ode to loss, as well as to love and desire: the sundering of McKay’s colonial identity, which was nurtured in the embrace of the “one pure bloom” of Englishness. But McKay is terribly “alone once more,” adrift and cut off from his surroundings and country.The poet’s gaze is mocked, and his “flowers” of youth (or Harlem’s passions) are stunted in this “unholy” place, even when a “sweet brown” maiden appears. (This image seems like contrivance and prop, much like the Cuban girl in “La Paloma.”) McKay’s desires take on a deadly and strange coloring, which Walter Jekyll had known would charm and ultimately compromise the poet’s craft.86 Before arriving in London that fall of 1919, McKay had traveled to The Hague from New York with a Dutch bibliophile, J.L.J.F.E. Ezerman, who took a liking to McKay’s poems and was responsible for his trip to England.87 The two had met in New York, where Ezerman hired McKay “to do research work on the Negro at the New York Public Library.” It would be, the poet hoped, a “happy change from the factory life.”88 It was Ezerman who suggested that McKay take along to Europe all his lyric verse, and he even offered to arrange and type the poems. Ezerman, like Walter Jekyll, was particularly taken with McKay’s “sex-passion” sonnets, modeled on the earlier Constab Ballads and

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written in a suggestive style that was popular among fin-de-siècle decadents. He also wanted to see the poet’s verse in print—without the gloss of race. A publisher, Grant Richards, was persuaded to sign onto the project over the summer of 1920, and Ezerman provided the cash to see the book through. In effect, Ezerman became McKay’s patron in England and provided much of the money for both Ogden and McKay to edit, typeset, and print what would eventually be published as Spring in New Hampshire.89 On his suggestion, it was first tentatively titled “Tropics in New York.” But there were unexplained pressures in getting the book done, and much of Ezerman’s money was used to rush it into print. McKay explained to Ogden that August: “It does seem as if I were in a hurry but my stay here was limited from the beginning to six months and I came with the definite purpose of having the poems published. Nothing else would have kept me in England so long.”90 The exchanges between Ezerman, McKay, and Ogden were clearly homosexual in the coded patterns of the early twentieth century.At times, McKay seemed to act as a naïf or seductress, playing one man off against the another, much as he had done in Jamaica with Sydney Olivier, the governor, and Walter Jekyll, his editor in Kingston. While Ezerman thought McKay was working on his Negro project, he was instead socializing with Ogden.Though they never met, what Ezerman knew of Ogden struck him as too English, though Ezerman could be a bit of an eccentric himself.91 Considerably older than Ogden or McKay (closer in age to Jekyll or Olivier), Ezerman appreciated the sexual and racial nuance in the poet’s verse in that suggestive scent of doubleness. But when he read the poems in Cambridge Magazine, he was enraged that all “the socialist stuff ”—what he called “the Labour and Russian Poems”— was eliminated. He was heartbroken as well, he wrote to McKay, that those “sex-passion sonnets,” as he called them, were not included.92 Possibly one of the “Labour” poems was “Travail,” which the poet had written while in London; it appeared in the January 10, 1920, issue of Workers’ Dreadnought: The crimson rides the universal wind, The raven spreads his pinions, follows after, The eagles, leaden-winged, are left behind; The old foundations shake from sill to rafter Deaf to the doubters’ jeers, the weaklings’ means, The toilers, tired of yielding and false giving, Bend to the mighty task, with solacing groans, Of making the earth fit for human living . . . My ear is tuned unto new voices shrieking Their jarring notes of life-exalting strife;

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My soul soars singing, with flame forces seeking The grandest purpose, noblest path of life; Where scarlet pennants blaze like tongues of fire, There—where high passion swells—is my heart’s desire. Ezerman also might have been referring to “Joy in the Woods,” published in Workers’ Dreadnought April 10, 1920, a more rustic ballad with a focus on mechanical culture’s encroaching on the poet’s beloved pastoral: There is joy in the woods just now, The leaves are whispers of song, And the birds make mirth on the bough And music the whole day long, And God! to dwell in the town In these springlike summer days, On my brow, an unfading frown And hate in my heart always— A machine out of gear, aye, tired, Yet forced to go on—for I’m hired. Just forced to go on through fear, For every day I must eat And find ugly clothes to wear, And bad shoes to hurt my feet And a shelter for work-drugged sleep! A mere drudge! but what can one do? A man that’s a man cannot weep! Suicide? A quitter? Oh, no! But a slave should never grow tired, Whom the masters have kindly hired. But oh! I for the woods, the flower Of natural, sweet perfume, The heartening summer showers And the smiling shrubs in bloom, Dust-free, dew-tinted at morn, The fresh and life-giving air, The billowing waves of corn And the birds’ notes rich and clear:— For a man-machine toil-tired May crave beauty too—though he’s hired. Might the allure in those “sex-passion sonnets” that so enchanted Ezerman have to do with McKay’s own predilection for decadence and self-immolation?93 In

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“Battle,” for instance, the poet’s body is literally a killing field, where “earth is ruled by man’s imperial power.” It is a modern Roman feast within a Christlike allegory. Last night I dreamed that in the deadly strife, Where privileged power rules with ruthless might, I saw my body, a corpse still breathing life, Trampled and mangled, a bloody, blackened sight. If such should be my fate, I pray it will Come to me sudden-swift, a keen sword-dart, The rhythmic beat of my rebellious heart. So, I should have the grand end come to me, While following the only way of duty And questing for the soul of truth and beauty! I’d go convinced that there could never be A fairer life for truth or beauty’s flower, While earth is ruled by man’s imperial power.94 As for the work that was excluded, McKay explained to Ogden, elliptically, that Ezerman had “sentimental ideas about that sort of stuff.” He was “of the old traditional school,” more like Jekyll, even Olivier, who liked their sexuality less abrasive. But, McKay admitted, the old Dutchman is trying his best “to shake off some of the dust.”95 Yes, as Ogden had hinted, Ezerman had “plenty of feeling, but no fine discriminating taste.”96 Still, McKay assured the Englishman, Ezerman would not interfere with their plans:“I am not going to let him if I can.”97 Ezerman did have some valid objections, however. For instance, he thought that Ogden in his Cambridge Magazine introduction to the poems had made too broad a deal about race.Those “peculiar qualities” in the poems and the rhythms of the Syncopated Orchestra that were representative of the “distinctive contribution of African Art in general” were simply not there. The Syncopated Orchestra was the current rage at the Coliseum, and Ogden used the occasion to make what he thought was a complementary connection with African works of the diaspora.98 But Ezerman disagreed. He wrote to McKay on June 18: “The comparison of your work with the renderings of the Syncopated Orchestra seems rather far-fetched to me. What struck me most, when I heard them, was their tremendous rhythmic development.The quality of that rhythm is quite different than that of your poems.”99 Over the months, McKay began to appreciate Ogden for his grace and subtlety, and quite possibly for his connection to English literary traditions, such as the Romantics. Instead of relating his verse to Benin sculptures, which were the rage in London, New York, and Paris intellectual circles, Ogden saw

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McKay’s verse as a new form that blended, like ragtime, various styles and traditions such as gospel, jazz, and, syncopation, which shifts the emphasis of the rhythm. (And, in fact, syncopation is a novel way to read McKay’s verse.) Still, Ezerman was shocked that McKay would allow his work to be manipulated; he scolded:“It seems dangerous and unfair to you, to judge your work on the strength of the fact that you are a Negro. But perhaps it is the best way to get known.” Halfway through a reading of the poems in Cambridge Magazine, he asked: “Did you yourself choose these or was it the Editor?”100 What kept McKay from giving in to Ezerman’s criticisms, which were sincere though exaggerated, was his loyalty to Ogden’s vision, which was tempered in an international moment that crisscrossed traditions and styles. He wrote Ogden about Ezerman: “I think he entirely misses what you are trying to show, that there is a universal community of art and culture. And if his environment and the influence of others can so easily be traced in an artist’s work I think that in a much deeper sense the temperament or higher thought of his race may be found therein.”101 Ogden and McKay came together on many points, particularly in the arena of art. In galleries, at the British Museum—even at his Soho flat, where he collected African masks—Ogden relied upon McKay, his impressions and ability to synthesize, as a source of valuable insight into his own theoretical projections of this new, terrifying hybrid aesthetic. “I’ve been looking at the girl’s head you spoke about,” McKay wrote Ogden of the style of several African prints, which included an image of a woman in a hornlike headdress. “It is great, indeed, the cheeks, chin, and forehead are exquisite.”Yet McKay found it hardly exotic, but “quite in the Greek tradition.” McKay was a patient teacher, explaining the differences, such as a print of a Congo woman’s head in the shape of a vessel (reproduced in Cambridge Magazine), which he found “altogether different with the other things, those I saw in Chelsea and at the museum.” He explained in detail at one point: They make me think of medicine gods and charms to frighten evil spirits. In the islands among the natives it is the reptile world that the obeahmen use to inspire fear in their clients—snakes, frogs, lizards, etc.We have a weird superstition about the salamander which I will tell you of sometime. Naturally in nearly all Negroes, at least the West Indians, where there is no real fear there is a great aversion to reptiles. And I sense the atmosphere of fear in the images. Indeed, the limbs make me think of reptiles. There is no repose, grace or dignity in them. They are disturbing. I shouldn’t care to live among them.102 But McKay, as in his Jamaican verse, may have been playing the trickster when he communicated this, his way of upping Ogden to the challenge. One

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wonders:Was he disturbed, as much as Ogden, by the depiction of these particular images, or was this merely reflective of a broadly ingrained bias shared by many Jamaicans toward reptiles and obeahmen? As to the source of those fears, one can only guess. SPRING IN NEW HAMPSHIRE and Other Poems appeared in October 1920. At least one journal, Ogden pointed out with satisfaction, “has done more than briefly indicate that a ‘nigger minstrel’ or an ‘overseas poet’ has issued some verses.” “It is an honour to our language—despite our racial shortcomings, it is a deserved honour—that it should have been chosen as a vehicle, by an African poet, for such a passionate exhortation to his own people.” Finally, Ogden gushed, a reviewer is crediting other influences, such as “African,” as an essential part of the reinvigoration of Western culture (regardless of how McKay felt about those African roots).103 “I must thank you,” McKay wrote Ogden appreciatively in October, “for all the unselfish interest and the trouble you have taken in making selections and choosing the style of the volume.”104 Even I. A. Richards, who was persuaded by Ogden to pen a brief preface to the book, noted that this was “the first instance of success in poetry with which we in Europe at any rate have been brought into contact.” Not only did McKay master literary English, he improved on it as well, Richards wrote:“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.”105 Richards had expressed his approval of the poems during the editing with Ogden, and had offered a few changes in the rhyme.106 Richards, who would go on to become a noted literary critic in England and the United States, responsible for the establishment of reader-response theory, placed McKay uniquely within mainstream English literature, if not within a broad modernist sensibility. He explained in his preface to Spring that “the poems here selected may, in the opinion of not a few who have seen them in periodical form, claim a place beside the best work that the present generation is producing in this country.” Ezerman, too, after his initial misgivings, declared the book a success. It was, as he put it,“dainty.”107 It is interesting that McKay’s appeal to progressives like Ogden, Richards, and even Sylvia Pankhurst and Gertrude and Walter Jekyll, was this ontological—or more precisely, orthological—position.Within that broad English crossing, as Stuart Hall observed, one’s view is continually fresh and modern, never singular and more “often intersecting and antagonistic.”108 McKay did, indeed, offer up new sounds, new textures, to a tired vocabulary, while keeping “all the familiar things in me intact.”109 One now has a better angle of understanding of this “battle” raging within that culturally blackened body. As for Ogden, he too was touched with a renewed commitment to seek

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out a medium of exchange for the global phenomenon of diaspora in the postmodern era. “Time is on our side,” McKay reminded his fellow internationalist of their larger aims. “Perhaps ten years hence the white peoples will realize what the war has done to this civilization. When I read of Churchill, Noske, and Foch still trying to raise great armies I can only smile bitterly and wonder if the European nations are determined to destroy the little that is left of them.”110 On October 9, 1920, McKay wrote Ogden that he was “cutting myself loose” from the Dreadnought circle. He was no longer able to deal with Pankhurst’s “erratic nature” or the increasing workload: There were myriad “domestic and business difficulties,” he complained, and “all the routine work of getting out her paper falls upon me in consequence.” Now that he had the power of real poetry, there was “nothing to be gained by keeping in with them.”111 It was time to move on.

C hap te r 6

Crossing the Shadow-Line The black man, forlorn in the cellar, Wanders in some mid-kingdom, dark, that lies, Between his tambourine, stuck on the wall, And, in Africa, a carcass quick with flies. —Hart Crane, “Black Tambourine”

There seems to have been smoldering resentment from New York publishers and editors when McKay returned from London, in January 1921, with a chapbook of verse written in “literary English.”Which will it be, we hear the poet ask in the syncopated offbeat of his verse, New York or London? In that intellectually rich encounter with “Old England,” however, McKay finally bids farewell to the “menial task” of subsistence jobs, misunderstandings, and misidentifications, and steams off to his “longed-for port” of endearing truth and beauty, alone and against strong currents. From “Rest in Peace”: No more for you the city’s thorny ways, The ugly corners of the Negro belt; The miseries and pains of these harsh days But you will never, never again be felt. No more, if still you wander, will you meet With nights of unabating bitterness, They cannot reach you in your safe retreat, The city’s hate, the city prejudice!1 Not only is McKay now navigating traditions and desires, much like Shakespeare in “Sonnet 80” adrift in his pursuit of a “darkly mistress” across wide oceans in an inferior “saucy bark,” but also he shifts his aesthetic focus from the city to the countryside.2 It is here that he moves into an encounter with a rich shadowed land. But rather than the idyllic mountaintops of Jamaica, this countryside touches on traditions of the romanticized past learned through books, gardening catalogues, and horticulture magazines. “They cannot reach you in your safe retreat,” he explains of those modern-day miseries and pains, 124

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the “ugly corners of the Negro belt.” In fact, one might read this poem and others written during his time with Ogden as eulogies for McKay’s racialized body, as it moves away from the material world of capitalism, the New Negro, ideology. The poem’s oceanic metaphor in the final stanza is reminiscent of Phillis Wheatley’s verse, which also played upon the turbulence of clashing traditions. But here there is a conscious crossover, as in “After the Winters,” which becomes the lyrical “After the Winter,” published in the Liberator in July 1919 and later in Spring in New Hampshire. The poet’s work is more ethereal, and his verse takes the form of a search for that all-consuming soul described by Coleridge as “everywhere and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.”3 Some day, when trees have shed their leaves And against the morning’s white The shivering birds beneath the eaves Have sheltered for the night, We’ll turn our faces southward, love, Toward the summer isle Where Bamboo’s spire to shafted grove And wide-mouthed orchids smile. This stanza, written in the United States, concludes: And we will seek the quiet hill Where towers the cotton tree, And leaps the laughing crystal rill, And works the droning bee. And we will build a lonely nest Beside an open glade, And there forever will we rest, O love—O nut-brown maid. A more gentle, rustic image pervades the poem’s British version, where the poet “will build a cottage there” rather than a “lonely nest” Beside an open glade, With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near And ferns that never fade. Ogden’s influence is evident in the omission from the British version of “nut-brown maid.” The poem ends in nature’s bosom instead of in love’s “lonely nest,” which stretches the Romantic gaze, from the ethereal and corporeal to a soothing “open glade.” The change from “winters” to “winter” in the title likewise confines that lyrical note. McKay’s English version, which

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follows, focuses upon a rustic cottage overlooking “black-ribbed blue-bells” and “ferns that never fade,” a complex botanical allusion that fixes an ancestral resting place in the earlier “My Mountain Home” (the ferns) with “blackribbed blue-bells.” For the poet, this is familiar ground, honed from that Jamaican pastoral he had carefully learned in Jekyll’s garden. (His “My Mountain Home” is now reimagined as a “summer isle” where love and happiness reside.) Some day, when trees have shed their leaves And against the morning’s white The shivering birds beneath the eaves Have sheltered for the night, We’ll turn our faces southward, love, Toward the summer isle Where Bamboo’s spire to shafted grove And wide-mouthed orchids smile. Beside an open glade, With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near And ferns that never fade.4 Such poems as “To Work” and “When Dawn Comes to the City” likewise display a metropolis and a shadowline, not only divided from night to day, however, but also along divisions of labor.5 “To Work” depicts the laboring forces within the fringe service industries in, for instance, Harlem, such as restaurant or dining-car work, and the stark transformation in those late-night hours in which “the mighty city is asleep.”The poet explained to Ogden that he had a mania for wandering, and it is those early morning hours of the city as workers retire after a hard night’s work that inspire him now: “late at night in the central business district under the great buildings when they are empty of life and traffic is stilled.”6 There is a sense of intersecting worlds and occupations as the poems follow the perambulations of the narrator “through the waning shadows of New York” of the early morning. Colors are muted and less sharp; the dawn carries with it the “crimson-tinted,” an allusion to the sordid multitudes or hoped-for rays of light. Those finely honed Romantic images in Spring in New Hampshire, etched with care and precision during his brief stay in London, are leveled for a U.S. edition by Max Eastman’s revisions, which began soon after the poet returned to New York and continued until the summer of 1922.7 That reorientation emerges as Harlem Shadows, a book that would inaugurate a black American aesthetic. But in Eastman’s own poems, we see a predilection for “marching” river ice and “stern-lipped fish,” a style carried over into his revisions of McKay’s verse. Eastman’s first book was a slim volume of blank verse titled

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Child of the Amazon and Other Poems (1913). An example of his style can be found in the poem “Conventional Life,” which begins: Midnight is coming And thinly in the deepness of the gloom Truth rises startle-eyed out of the tomb. And we are dumb.8 Oddly, Eastman had viewed McKay, since his return, as an upstart who must be put down, in his place, fixed, for using big words and English diction.9 The trend in U.S. prose and verse was for a sparse, plain-talking style, and McKay countered that. Understandably, the Jamaican author was concerned: He explained to Ogden that he wanted Alfred Knopf, the publisher,“to make his edition as nearly as possible as yours and I have written him to that effect. There are little things connected with the book and my being in England which aren’t quite clear to you and which I cannot altogether explain.”10 But Knopf would not consider McKay’s request, and another publisher wanted to “make a book of the hate poems,” McKay explained, modeled on works like Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, which appeared in 1920. McKay was hopeful that his own dainty words would stand defiantly on their own beauty and merits. Anything else, he reminded Ogden, would defeat his whole purpose in coming to England.11 Like Ogden, Eastman imagined a bold new style, but with McKay as a black crusader dressed in the garb of a Toussaint L’Ouverture, “a fighting liberator, a negro with power, pride of ancestry, and eternal rebellion in his soul.” With the fervor of a nineteenth-century abolitionist, Eastman believed that he was tapping into the free untamed humanity of McKay’s black psyche.12 (Eastman’s attempt at depicting that black humanity in such pieces as “Niggers and Night Riders,” which appeared in the Masses in 1913, provoked angry responses: “Your pictures of colored people would depress the negroes themselves and confirm the whites in their contemptuous and scornful attitude,” wrote a reader in the January 1913 issue.) Eastman’s response then—and now in 1921—was to rely on his own aesthetic inclinations.13 Eastman was a “fine type of man,” McKay wrote to Ogden in lieu of explanation, “rather handsome and devoid of mannerisms.”14 But it is precisely this type that always attempted to speak for the masses or to use them as symbolic agents of social change.“Why do Negroes express so little beyond the black-white relation?” complained James Rorty in the New Masses. “Why don’t they speak forthrightly as free untamed human beings? Are Negroes really savages? So many of them look, talk and write like sophisticated, tamed, adapted, behavioristic white men, and if that is what they want to be, it is nothing in the way of an inspiration.”15 McKay was crushed by the narrow-mindedness of his contemporaries and lamented to Nancy Cunard,

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herself a communist who was sympathetic to the plight of blacks: “We poor Negroes are literally smothered under reams of stale, hackneyed, repetitious stuff done by our friends, our moral champions, and ourselves.” Most live in fear of the fact of ourselves, he explained, and can hardly afford to render even the artistic birth of our own lives “as we know and feel it.” One mustn’t allow oneself to be handicapped by these “social-racial reactions” that “hamper us sometimes, unconsciously even.”16 Eastman’s attempts at reworking this humanity involved an awkward and derivative “darkly-rebel”—a composite of his own remarkable imagination. He also altered McKay’s pastoral orientation and the subtlety of those doubled literary tropes, turning “fantastic spires,” for instance, into more ideologically sleek “Manhattan roofs” in such pieces as “To Work,” which becomes transformed into “Dawn in New York,” one of the title choices rejected by Ogden. The poem, in fact, is an elegy on work, specifically Harlem work—marginal occupations with little job security or future.The “dawn” in McKay’s original poem, included in Spring in New Hampshire, is cruel and revealing, more like The Shadow-line of Joseph Conrad’s turn-of-the century novella than a romanticized image found in Shelley: The Dawn! The Dawn, the crimson-tinted comes Out of the low still skies, over the hills, New York’s fantastic spires and cheerless domes,— The Dawn! My spirit to its spirit thrills. Almost the mighty city is asleep, No pushing crowd, no trampling, tramping feet; But here and there a few cars, groaning, creep Along, above and underneath the street, Bearing their strangely-ghostly burdens by,— The women and the men of garish nights, Their eyes wine-weakened and their clothes awry, Nodding under the strong electric lights. On through the waning shadows of New York, Before the Dawn, I wend my way to work. The poem works at the transcendental juncture where the cultures of night and day intersect, a moment in which the poet, too, seems in transition— from Old England to metropolis, Ogden to Eastman, London to New York. That indeterminacy is undermined in Eastman’s edit, which transforms the “women and men of garish nights” who are peacefully “nodding” to sleep after a night of revelry in Harlem as “grotesques beneath the strong electric lights.” Instead of the compact couplet that closes the English version of “To Work”—“On through the waning shadows of New York, / Before the Dawn, I wend my way to work,” we have instead in “Dawn in New York”: “The

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shadows wane.The Dawn comes to New York. / And I go darkly-rebel to my work.” Similarly, another poem, “Castaways,” which plays on the theme of dispossession and alienation, takes on in Eastman’s edit his own ambivalence toward suffrage and internationalism.17 “Castaways” first appeared in England in a summer issue of Cambridge Magazine and in Spring in New Hampshire in the fall of 1920. It seems to have been revised from “The Park in Spring,” first published in Pearson’s magazine in September 1918.“The Park in Spring” is a work that “doubles” on Thomas Harding’s “Darkling Thrush,” written December 31, 1900, on the eve of a hopeful century. But McKay’s thrush is used in this poem as a jarring entry into a world of derelicts: “For misery / I have the strength to bear but not to see.”The outcasts on park benches, he realizes, are also “fallen” comrades and WWI veterans.18 Amid this urban clutter caused by a devastating war, McKay’s poetic eye dwells on those who exist in “life’s shadows,” such as his cabaret dancer. All are now among the “castaways of earth,” the unemployed and dispossessed, with “many a withered woman wedged between,” who in the English version of “Castaways” exist “over all life’s shadows dark and deep”: The vivid grass with visible delight Springing triumphant from the pregnant earth; And butterflies, and sparrows in brief flight Chirping and dancing for the season’s birth, And dandelions and rare daffodils That hold the deep-stirred heart with hands of gold And thrushes sending forth their joyous trills’ Not these, not these did I at first behold: But seated on the benches daubed with green, The castaways of earth, some fast asleep, With many a withered woman wedged between, And over all life’s shadows dark and deep: Moaning, I turned away, for misery I have the strength to bear but not to see. But the Eastman version of this poem in Harlem Shadows speaks of “withered women desolate and mean”; they are no longer of “the earth,” but of life. In this subtle shift in nuance, they become the few instead of the many, reduced to a slice of life that has been “wedged between” society’s concerns. (Though not intended, the change is a commentary on women’s devaluation in the postwar years.) Women “wedged between” were frequently found in poetry of the era and were not restricted to Harlem or street vagrants. The poet Louis Untermeyer noted, in “Any City”:

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Into a staring street, She goes on her nightly round, With weary and tireless feet Over the wretched ground. A thing that man never spurns, A thing that all men despise; Into her soul there burns The street with its pitiless eyes. And that gaze was not monopolized by males but shared poetically with women, as in Lydia Gibson’s “Lies”: Along the gaslit Boulevard, Under the shadow-spreading trees They walk, the slender silhouettes, Night-hidden, but for outlines hard, Slow-stepping, wanly mad to please, While, heart-deep, endless Hunger frets.19 What distinguishes McKay’s image, though, is his sensitivity to “fallen women” of color, who had received scant attention from white or black writers. Thus, a poem like “Harlem Shadows” plays on conceits and stereotypes (conjured by Gibson and Untermeyer) at the expressive and epistemological frequency and is doubled in that Victorian literary sense. It is both a nocturnal and sexual world, concerned, as Yeats had explained, with simple impressions.20 But those images are jagged and torn, ahistorical and diasporic.Against the urbane and voguish rhythms of the New Negro, a trope Alain Locke later used to appease the era’s obsession with the exotic, McKay explored a shadowed country under the horticultural lens of a commonwealth garden.This is where rural and urban converge in ways that Raymond Williams might interpret as mobility and migration in the early twentieth century.Those who toil in this field, understandably, are not just prostitutes or cabaret workers but include a vast country of migrant workers. They inhabit the margins of race and gender in this convergence of country and city, as in “Harlem Shadows,” published in Pearson’s in September 1918:21 I hear the halting footsteps of a lass In Negro Harlem when the night lets fall Its veil. I see the shapes of girls who pass To bend and barter at desire’s call. Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet Go prowling through the night from street to street! Through the long night until the silver break Of day the little gray feet know no rest;

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Through the lone night until the last snow-flake Has dropped from heaven upon the earth’s white breast, The dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet Are trudging, thinly shod, from street to street. Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace, Has pushed the timid little feet of clay, The sacred brown feet of my fallen race! Ah, heart of me, the weary, weary feet In Harlem wandering from street to street. The poet uses an English lyrical image, that of Wordsworth’s heroic Scottish “lass” (Wordsworth’s “solitary reaper,” another of the disenfranchised, speaks “of battles long ago” in an indecipherable language, across geography). But that allusion is refracted through a hardened visage of an urban cabaret worker who, like McKay and the Highland reaper, speaks of “far-off things.” McKay works within a harsh postcolonial paradigm as well—the “white” men who are involved with war and Harlem patronage, and the “shadow” industries (colonials, women, the poor, even poets) that cater to them. But that country lass is transfigured into a recognizable trope for McKay, a part of the “sacred brown feet of my fallen race,” as enduring as her Scottish counterpart. And across time and space, the lay that Wordsworth is charmed by yet cannot understand becomes finely tuned to the beat of a modern-day cabaret. Incredibly, McKay does not judge this Harlem woman’s work—in fact, he seems to admire her (heresy at the time of the Mann Act and the so-called white slave trade, although McKay might be making a bolder commentary on society’s inattention to the black female slave trade).22 Feet become, for McKay, as wonderful as those remarkably pliant Spanish needles and are the same whether one resides in Harlem or the countryside. It is not only a diasporic moment for McKay, but also a trans-Atlantic one, linking colonial and colonizer, the high land and the low.The “halting footsteps” of our Harlem lass interrupt the “solitary Highland Lass,” creating a cultural opening. Instead of a lass on a windy hilltop “reaping and singing,” she morphs into “the shapes of girls who pass / To bend and barter at desire’s call.” (The poem even echoes William Blake’s dainty imagery of determined feet that “walk upon England’s mountain s green.”)23 For McKay, feet represent acculturation and elasticity (and given McKay’s early trek in the jungle and mountaintops of Jamaica, one wonders if there is a connection to his mentor Walter Jekyll, who was an avid walker).The poet calls them the “heart of me,” these “feet of clay”—so simply made of earth yet, when molded, beautifully complex. But against “the veil” of “Negro Harlem,” that image is blurred in the dawn’s early twilight. Pastoral elements in the poem are tightly compressed within an anonymity that reflects

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a more timorous modern condition (much like that flittering veil described earlier by Yeats). Little is revealed of McKay’s Harlem lass (Wordsworth’s reaper, as well, is elusive) except her brown feet, which connect appropriately to the earth and beyond to the pastoral tradition of Wordsworth, as well as to McKay’s own fire-burnt fields in Jamaica. When “Harlem Dancer” first appeared, William Stanley Braithwaite, the influential black critic, proclaimed it “the keystone of the new movement in racial poetic achievement.”24 Yet Braithwaite coolly avoided discussing the oppression of blacks or women, and instead admired the poet’s ability to reproduce what he called “a hectic scene of reality,” and to make the poem float as if it were “upon a background of illusion through which comes piercing the glowing sense of a spiritual mystery.” Braithwaite politely overlooks the central concern of this verse, however, and instead praises “the significance of the intoxicated figure with its sensuous contagion into something ultimate behind the ‘falsely-smiling face,’ where ‘herself ’—be it the innocent memory of childhood, perhaps of some pursuing dream of a brief happiness in love, or a far-away country home which her corybantic earnings secures in peace and comfort for the aged days of her parents—is inviolably wrapped in the innocence and beauty of her dreams.”25 The beauty of the poem, however, lies in the way McKay uses the sonnet, which was a popular form among feminists and working-class writers at the time, and refashioned it almost immediately as a hybrid style. Edna St.Vincent Millay, among the most notorious of the radical lyricist group, was less concerned with breaking form than with making powerful impressions. Countee Cullen, another Harlem Renaissance writer, also used the convention to convey subtle racial or religious subtexts. But McKay is more interested in word play, acquired from his work with Ogden, and one can easily read “blacks” for “masses,” see subtle inversions in relationships, and observe the working out of metaphoric meaning along colliding traditions. Into the tight Shakespearean sonnet form McKay skillfully inserts an oral call-and-response annancy style: the first sets up the situation; the second provides an answer. Much as Shakespeare used it, McKay’s response (the end turn, or finishing couplet) is shrouded in enigma, as in these lines from “Castaways,” included in Spring in New Hampshire: Moaning I turned away, for misery I have the strength to bear but not to see. McKay left for Europe soon after Eastman finished with Harlem Shadows. Possibly his move came out of frustration with the book, or he simply needed an excuse to stop off in England before traveling on to Russia, to visit with Ogden as he had promised.After attending the Third International in Moscow

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in October 1922, McKay stayed on in Petrograd until May, finishing up The Negroes in America, a work that grew out of his discussions with Trotsky on the “Negro Question.”26 Wanted for questioning by the U.S. State Department, however, McKay was unable to return to the United States or even to England, for that matter, where he was suspected of treason because of his ties with Pankhurst. Back in Harlem and the United States, a politically hardened image of the poet began to unfold, built in part upon Eastman’s editing of and introduction to Harlem Shadows.27 Unaware of his notoriety, McKay traveled to Berlin, where he met Alain Locke, who was collecting material for his New Negro project.28 Locke, who had become familiar with Berlin as a philosophy student, suggested a tour of one of the artistic treasures of the city, the Tiergarten. McKay found it ironic that the leading authority on African sculpture should be so enamored of the statues of Prussian kings.“I felt that there was so much more affinity between the art of George Grosz and African sculpture,” McKay explained, “than between the Tiergarten’s insipid idealization of Nordic kings and artists and the transcending realism of the African artists.”W.E.B. Du Bois, too, when he was a student in Berlin, had become excited by such “march of soldiers, the saluting of magnificent uniforms, the martial music and rhythm of movement,” and commented, in 1936, how the streets reverberated with “the sound of heavy boots.” Locke and Du Bois, oddly, saw Berlin as a place of racial “unity” and an inspiration for their own work in race politicking. For McKay, however, it was the epicenter for “the resentful spirit of all Germany,” where comrades such as Rosa Luxemburg were kidnapped and executed; a “futuristic forest” in which there were “Wandervogel everywhere like a plague of flies.”29 Although the Continent was “an infinitely more congenial place for the American Negro,” McKay was hard-pressed, he admitted to Cunard, to “afford living there.”30 But other more frightening incidents convinced him to move to that “far-off sunny southland” about which he wrote in the poem “Spanish Needles.” In October 1923, in a letter to Arthur Schomburg, he catalogued the abuses by “the German Right against their moderate and radical opponents.” Berlin, once receptive to Negro intellectuals, had become “a brutal might”: A Frankenstein in which the dynamo Of Europe throbbed with sinister intent. Yet strangely from the common ebb and flow Issued a surge of sickening sentiment. Around that force rococo, insipid.31 Such images are the grounding for “The Desolate City,” an impressionistic work that is characteristic of McKay’s unique pastoral, where city and country merge in an organic synthesis. It is largely symbolic, and “a composite and

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evocation” of his time in Europe.32 In it, the poet’s muscle and bones play out the fantasies of homeland, becoming the actual girders of a pestilential, postempiric metropolis “glutted with baffled hopes.”33 In “The Desolate City,” these sinews are where the modern pastoral, for the colonial, emerges: Strange agonies make quiet lodgment there: Its sewers, bursting, ooze up from below And spread their loathsome substance through its lanes, Flooding all areas with their evil flow And blocking all the motions of its veins: Its life is sealed to love or hope or pity, My spirit is a pestilential city. The poem is about blocked motions, sealed lives, quiet lodgments. It describes a poet in exile and evokes Bryon’s Childe Harold, who likewise wears “the shattered links of the world’s broken chains.” High above the poem’s walls, however, loom an empty tower and broken minaret. (One wonders what that minaret might mean for McKay. Possibly it hangs above the desolate city in places like Berlin and Paris, much like that rough beast in Yeats’s “The Second Coming.”) The landscape has mutated. Leaves are “shriveled silver,” parched with decay, and have yellowed. There is some resiliency to his body, and as it sketches city and poet become one—organic, regenerative, idealized, much like that synthesis we find in his earlier Caribbean verse, such as “A Dream.” In McKay’s “Desolate City”: Above its walls the air is heavy-wet, Brooding in fever mood and hanging thick Round empty tower and broken minaret, Settling upon the tree tops stricken sick And withered under its contagious breath. Their leaves are shriveled silver, parched decay, Like wilting creepers trailing underneath The chalky yellow of a tropic way. Round crumbling tower and leaning minaret, The air hangs fever-filled and heavy-wet. And all its many fountains no more spurt; Within the dammed-up tubes they tide and foam, Around the drifted sludge and silted dirt, And weep against the soft and liquid loam. And so the city’s ways are washed no more, All is neglected and decayed within, This metropolis, much like McKay’s childhood image of England, “does not transcend space and time: it is always being built indifferently, destroyed and

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rebuilt out of the same material,” explains Isobel Armstrong.34 It has become closed to ideas and transaction—a place where even nature is unwelcome—and strangled in its own “silted dirt.” As in Locke’s Harlem, “clean waters beat against its high-walled shore” but cannot enter. More disturbing is that the soil, in “The Desolate City,” has shriveled “beneath the jet-gloom of the mounting rocks”:35 The little pools lie poisonously still, And birds come to the edge in forlorn flocks, And utter sudden, plaintive notes and shrill, Pecking at strangely gray-green substances; But never do they dip their bills and drink. They twitter, sad beneath the mournful trees, And fretfully flit to and from the brink, In little gray-brown, green-and-purple flocks, Beneath the jet-gloom of the mounting rocks. The only thriving creatures are “green-eyed moths of curious design” who rest upon “bold, burning blossoms.” But even they are “doomed to drooping stupor, there to die.” Above all “float a host of yellow flies.” Before the fall of “pestilential showers,” McKay notes of this modern era, there was a more natural city, sweet with children’s voices. But it is all “gone, gone forever,” those familiar forms of life “to which the city once so dearly clung.”War and injustice have “blown worlds beyond by the destroying storms / And lost away like lovely songs unsung.” Yet life still lingers, questioningly strange, Timid and quivering, naked and alone, Against the cycle of disruptive change.36 There is a vast tumbling and enfolding of traditions that projects out onto this modern metropolis, one that is in need of ecological repair: “The landscapes of all and any latitudes, the monumental buildings of all and any cultures.”37 In such poems as “Mummy,” written during this time, we have a sense of the poet attempting to preserve his body against the rise of fascism and political repression, a disintegration that parallels his own physical and mental breakdown as refugee, exile, fugitive. In Europe, McKay explores the fissures of that façade, and it is an internal history as oblique and nameless as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” or James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, published anonymously in 1912.This syncretized black-white identity, which was McKay’s English pedigree, is now stretched along a psychological axis, blurred in his weakened mental condition due to a severe case of syphilis, to arrive at what Frantz Fanon has called the liberation from a racialized self.The poet attempts

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to move beyond a “superficially racist context” to a source of inspiration through which “all his experiences were filtered.”38 In “The Void,” which appeared in the June 1926 Crisis, McKay writes: He crouches strangely in the little bed And earnestly stares blankly into space, Reason forever more from him has fled, A child’s mind settles sadly on his face. The classic loveliness of plain white walls, The shadows softening the long, low ceiling, Against the low dull lights at evening fall, Impart to the sick room a holy feeling. Maybe no hand once trembled with desire, Sheer love of form, to touch that ugly brow, But here disease-transformed, scourged by the fire, Beauty the loftiest has touched it now. Words such as “white,” “shadows,” and “fire” are no longer ominous or even discursive, but serenely comforting.There is a religious aura to the poem, yet even here, there is an in-between feel, much like the hospital, “half workhouse and half jail,” late-Victorian poet William Ernest Henley describes in “In Hospital.” McKay is soothed by “the classic loveliness” of those “plain white walls” of his hospital ward, in contrast to Henley’s “gaunt” and “brown” interior, and it is this vantage point—what Homi Bhabha might describe as the beyond of culture—from which he begins the completion of his poetic cycle across and into his shadowed country.39 Marseilles, McKay wrote Louise Bryant, a longtime friend and the wife of John Reed, would be his “last and cheapest stand” in Europe.40 Like that of Harlem, the beauty of this city, as others had discovered, was “buried for ever beneath wealth, squalor, heat disease, pleasure, toil, crime, commerce, and the inevitable clash of so many nationalities.” It was a place, much like Stuart Hall’s imaginary location, that possessed a certain simultaneity, “in which these things co-exist, flourish fully and naturally with a light freedom and naiveté that is as undoubted as it is indefinable and indescribable.”41 The city had, in fact, all the elements suitable for an internationalist such as McKay who was part of the “past-present” continuum, not of nostalgia, but of the living—for within the “gates of the cosmopolis of Marseilles,” none was a stranger.42 Here might exist that idyll of which McKay wrote. Marseilles was like that vast caldron described by Sydney Olivier, the Jamaican hillside, where “all the derelicts of the seas,” like a vast sargasso, drift up “to sprawl out the days in the sun.” It was “vast and not too healthy in body, international in mind, and unconfined of soul.” It was described by one early

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twentieth-century traveler as “so light and free and untrammeled in its spirit that one may at first hug the illusion that it does not exist.” Frederick Douglass, too, found Marseilles more like magic than reality:“Not only was the climate different, but the people seemed different. A certain blending of the Orient with the Occident was plainly visible.”43 Bryant was right when she told McKay to go to Africa, or anywhere, but stay away from Paris. McKay was indeed relieved “to live in a great gang of black and brown humanity,” which had proclaimed to the world, “the grandest thing about modern life was that it was bawdy.”44 Marseilles was “good for me,” the poet concluded, like “a straight dry heat that was good for the skin.”45 But Morocco, a short journey by sea across the Strait of Gibraltar, seemed a place of pure poetry. And here the poet finds that inspirational route back from malaise to recovery. It was a movement away from that shadow-line and toward an ever-present becoming. He traveled to Morocco in 1928, encouraged by a Martinique seaman, one of the motley mix he befriended in Marseilles while working on his novel Banjo, and it became his refuge from the disease and political turmoil of the continent. Here his verse reflected a sensuality that contrasted with the blockages and fog of Europe. “I think I will stay here,” he admitted to Cunard,“for quite a long time.”46 Here, too was a simultaneity not unlike that of Marseilles, where the current was stronger and more persistent—a porous opening between East and West, Africa and the Orient. In Tangier, there was: A beauty pregnant of life’s pristine womb, Whose fingers, dripping with experience, Caressed my spirit and held it growing rich, While, on your bosom asleep, I beard the drum Of Africa upswelling from the dense Dim deeps to stir you far upon the height.47 More than any other colonial city,Tangier possessed an interesting layering of indigenous and expatriate cultures, which enhanced its “special character” and appeal.48 In fact, McKay remarked to Max Eastman:“There are many things in the life of the natives, their customs and superstitions, reminiscent of Jamaica.”49 McKay scraped together his slim royalties from Home to Harlem, put the sum toward a down payment on a dilapidated farmhouse on the outskirts of the city, and immediately began to explore the strange yet familiar countryside. Xauen, which lies in a remote gorge in the Rif Mountains, considered by Moroccans a holy mecca, was a “lovely fountain” that cleansed him of all his “bitter memories” of racial strife. Oh, lovely fountain bubbling in my breast, And cleansing all the bitter memories,

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Of pilgriming over the gutters of life: Flow tenderly along the avenue Of my bruised body, heavy upon my knees, And wash the incisions where the sharp-edged knife Of circumstance has penetrated through: Bathe me always as when I was your guest. Oh, lovely fountain flowing like the dawn, That comes like spiders weaving silver charm Upon the heavy dews of Afric’s night, Perspiring for the happy days so warm And amorous from the pressure of the light, Playing upon the gem the Moors call Xauen.50 Nearby was the Suani, a tidal river that was “always calm and excellent for bathing when the sea is often rough because of the strait and Levant winds.” McKay was not much of a swimmer but was “very fond of floating in deep water at high tide,” especially when “the sea drives up the river.” On a hilltop above his house was an Arab village of about five hundred people, “and a few friends always came down from these and over from town to visit me.”51 McKay had found his ideal English garden, it seemed, in the Moroccan hillside, where “lyric and amatory poetry” were part of a folk tradition that even the most “illiterate Moor” enjoyed. “Certainly it was the Arabian poet,” McKay was convinced, “who, upon the Arab conquest of Spain, introduced lyric feeling into the rude and barbaric accents of the Europeans.” Like his mentor in Jamaica,Walter Jekyll, McKay quickly involved himself in the local folklore “like a loco” and visited Arabian cafes in search of native music and poetry. He became known affectionately as “Claudio,” an expatriate gone native. When Charles Henri Ford and Paul Bowles encountered him, the poet seemed quite in his element,“plump and jolly, with a red fez on his head.” He had been living for some time, remarked Bowles with a touch of envy,“exactly like a Moroccan.”52

C hap te r 7

Postscript: 1848–1919 The chaoush said he didn’t understand what was an internationalist. I laughed and said that an internationalist was a bad nationalist. —Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home

The baffling thing about internationalism is how vast it was in its reach and how anti-ideological in its insurgency, yet how unacknowledged it is today. Uniquely, as a fin-de-siècle movement, it synthesized traditions in the nineteenth century, such as abolition and suffrage, with newer ones in the twentieth, horticulture or pacifism, moving out into the colonies, as well as into the metropolis. This groundswell of activity, from the late Victorian era to the end of World War I, converged for the poet Claude McKay and others under a crimson banner of internationalism and pacifism—to ride out the turbulence of the early twentieth century, McKay believed, on a mighty “universal wind.” In spirit and temperament, McKay was one of those remarkable interventionists described by Brent Hayes Edwards who had his ear and eye primed to the incomplete work of the past while conjuring a new and exciting space for the future. In “Travail,” McKay writes: My soul soars singing, with flame forces seeking The grandest purpose, noblest path of life; Where scarlet pennants blaze like tongues of fire, There—where high passion swells—is my heart’s desire.1 In 1900, with the boldness that only the turn of a century can evoke, a French radical, Emile Arnaud, announced:“We are not passive types, we are not peace makers; we are not just pacifiers; we are all those but something more.” He proudly proclaimed himself “a pacifist.” And “our ideology,” he warned, would be pacifism.There was something special about the movement. Understandably, governments moved quickly to squash this popular revolt and relied upon the whims and prejudices of its own artists, New Negroes as well as New Humanists, to derail its appeal.2 And under the right conditions—laying the groundwork for preparedness, prosperity, nationhood—they succeeded.3 139

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By 1908,“peace ideas and their practitioners,” for all intents and purposes, had become the “national enemies,” as boundaries continued to be erased, consumed, devalued, and patrolled.The era that spawned pacifism, coincidentally, also gave license to propaganda as a new art form, foreshadowing a teeming metropole of shadowy specters and dodgy word magic.4 But as the historian Sandi Cooper has noted, internationalists, without a firm ideological base of appeal to either nation or political party, faced insurmountable resistance.“Few words are as misunderstood and even abused,” she points out, “as internationalism and pacifism.” And few ideologies have been so subject to conditioning—“by time, place, cultural and political settings.” The history of these “two isms,” and their coming together briefly in these amazing times in which McKay lived and wrote, is a continual reminder, even today, that “one generation’s realism is the next generation’s world war.”5 Internationalism crisscrossed national boundaries, much like the vernacular, and gained appeal among older intellectuals of the late nineteenth century in the United States and England, such as Frederick Douglass. Disenchanted with the direction of U.S. political discourse, Douglass began to think like an internationalist in his later years. The transformation occurred at a historic meeting on March 31, 1888, in Washington, D.C., near his home, where he lived with his wife, the suffragist Helen Pitts.6 “Any man can be brave when the danger is over,” he told an enthusiastic crowd of former abolitionists and new feminists from around the world who’d come to celebrate the inauguration of the International Council of Women,“go to the front door when there is no resistance, rejoice when the battle is fought and victory is won; but it is not so easy to venture upon a field untried with one-half of the world against you.”7 Douglass, at seventy-one, seemed set and primed for another human rights struggle, one that focused on those impermeable borders around the United States that allowed Plessy v. Ferguson, legislated by Congress in 1896, to be commonplace. The legislation would be enacted soon after the abolitionist’s death, but long before that, to Douglass’s thinking, the nation had failed.8 Douglass had stepped into the international arena when he announced a “colored people day” at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Along with Ida B. Wells-Barnett, whose newspaper offices were torched by angry Southern white men after she broached the miscegenation question, he handed out to bemused European onlookers copies of The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbia Exposition.9 In the pamphlet, Douglass also took issue with Booker T.Washington’s speech before the Labor Congress that envisioned a new working relationship between Southern industry and former slaves that would be less exploitative than some businesses in the North. (The speech would be the prototype for his better known Atlanta Exposition Address of 1895.) Douglass, however, pointed out the universality of the wage

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system’s exploitation: “The man who in slavery days said to the Negro ‘You shall be a slave or die,’ now added “You shall work for me at the wages I propose or starve.’ ” This was met with an icy silence by politicians and young ambitious race leaders like Washington.10 The wolf, Douglass boasted, would “still be howling on their summits” had it not been for the sweat and hard work of the Irish and Negroes who built this land. Their payment, he acknowledged, was overdue. “Without these, and the wealth created by their sturdy toil, English civilization,” he remarked, would still be lingering “this side of the Alleghanies.”11 Increasingly, in his later years, Douglass saw his role as agitator and cared less about racial propriety.12 “I do not presume to be a leader,” he scolded audiences,“[and] if I have advocated the cause of the colored people it is not because I am a negro, but because I am a man.”13 He considered himself a man with sexual feelings and a discriminating mind—not an agent of change, but living in the moment, advocating for the cause of international freedom and justice.Thus, he criticized those who blacklisted him and attacked his character for his marriage to a white woman. Douglass bucked the trend of the New Negro as well, which Booker T.Washington was formulating for the new century, and ventured onto dangerous political shoals when he broached the notion that there was “no division of races.” He looked forward to an era, perhaps in the early twentieth century, when “the varieties of races” would be blended into one. “Let us look,” he urged, to a time “when the black and the white people were distinct in this country.” In two hundred and fifty years, there has grown up “an intermediate race of a million.” And, he believed, this would continue.14 This new internationalist configuration, composed of women and men, Douglass explained, would be “a weapon superior to words, guns, and dynamite, a weapon before which powers and principalities and all forms of oppression may well fear and tremble.”15 This, however, would not become apparent until later on, in the shadow of a belligerent landscape, when the nations of Europe would make a last mad dash—a “scramble,” as some described it—for Africa. The women’s movement, which Douglass unabashedly supported throughout his life, would become a powerful player in that international arena, he prophesized.“National lines, geographical lines, do not and cannot confine it . . . for when it is struck down in one direction it is struck down in another and in all directions.”16 In such a state of mind, the old abolitionist remarked, “a man’s country becomes the world, and his countrymen, all mankind.”17 In the early twentieth century, internationalists built upon that Douglass tradition of agitation and devised even more elaborate and playful antics, such as the War against War exhibit organized by the suffragist Crystal Eastman and Walter Fuller. There were also silent marches organized in opposition to the war, and the violence against blacks related to it.A giant papier-mâché dinosaur

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floated effortlessly around New York City, symbolizing the old order. “No Navies,“World Federation,” and “Our platform: Internationalism” were just a few of the numerous direct actions by the ambitious Women’s Peace Party from 1916 to 1919 that Eastman hoped would inaugurate a glorious International Age.18 Yet despite their casual nature, these so-called interventionists coolly itemized the “arms-race costs” against the “social disequilibrium” of war. And in so doing, Eastman, McKay, and others in the early century set the ground for what later scholars acknowledge as our modern consciousness of war and social justice.19 Such a task, Crystal Eastman realized, was worthy only of “the grimmest and the gayest fighters among us.”20 The importance, perhaps, for us today, in our understanding of Claude McKay and this puzzling inability to be fixed in a literary moment, might be found in this shadowed country known as internationalism. It too had evaded the official radar of history and long been overlooked and devalued. Scores of its intellectuals have “disappeared,” and its very existence, the historian Sandi Cooper tells us, is continually questioned by the more pragmatic “as a phenomenon that falls on the continuum between utopianism and treason.” But Cooper points out that historians—and most everyone else, for that matter— have learned to “tiptoe cautiously through dictionary and encyclopedia definitions and live with the diversity resulting from complex and charged origins.” Few, however, look to those moments for real answers to persistent problems—and for good reason. It is, really, about how one perceives the country, the landscape—the world. Possibly one item for future discussion, Cooper suggests,“is to find a way to convince a broader public of that complexity.”21 Who knows, perhaps it may prove a refreshing diversion from our own posthistory muddle that has made ideological discourse so irrelevant today.22

N ote s

Abbrev i at i on s u se d i n th e Note s

Cunard Collection

Nancy Cunard Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin

Ogden Papers

C. K. Ogden Papers, William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Canada

Johnson Collection

James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven

Schomburg Collection

Arthur Schomburg Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York City

Chapte r 1

A Poet in the Country

The epigraph is from McKay to Cunard, September 29, 1932, Nancy Cunard Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin (hereafter, Cunard Collection). Cunard, a poet, also edited The Negro Anthology (London: Wishart, 1934; retitled Negro: An Anthology, edited and abridged [New York: Continuum, 1990]). She was born in 1896, the only child of Sir Bache Cunard. She later became a communist and campaigned to free the Scottsboro boys in the 1930s. Her involvement with McKay dates to the mid-1920s when she requested material from him for her anthology. She died in 1965. 1. This is how McKay characterized himself to C. K. Ogden, the editor known for his work in Basic English. Ogden helped revise Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems, McKay’s first book of English poems. McKay commented on the similarities between English and U.S. intellectuals, such as Max Eastman, the radical editor, and Ogden, and his own divergence as a Caribbean writer:“There is more between you both, than there is between me and either of you” (McKay to Ogden, 1922, C. K. Ogden Papers, William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Canada [hereafter, Ogden Papers]). 2. Racial unrest began as early as 1918 in East St. Louis, Illinois. A year later, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, along with 247 others accused of being radicals,

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were forced onto the Buford troopship and sent off to Russia.The German socialist Rosa Luxembourg and her companion Karl Liebknecht mysteriously disappeared and were found floating in a Berlin canal. The Hungarian Revolution was just beginning and there were factory occupations in Italy and general strikes in Amsterdam. McKay’s internationalism differed markedly from the communists’. His orientation was toward Fabian socialism, which had a more pastoral vision of the revolution that eschewed vanguards and class struggle. Williams, The Country and the City, 285. Basutoland became Lesotho and achieved independence in 1960. It was the birthplace of Olive Schreiner, author of The Story of an African Farm (1927) and outspoken critic of imperialism. Basutoland was one of three British High Commission Territories, along with Bechuanaland (now Botswana) and Swaziland, that were excluded from the South African republic. Williams goes on to say that this shift also raises questions of literary fact and perspective: “The things they are saying are not at all in the same mode.” The initial problem of definition, he explains,“a persistent problem of form, is the question of the pastoral, of what is known as pastoral” (ibid., 9–12). I refer to and quote from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (New York: Dover, 1990), 5. The comment on the queer jumble is from D. H. Lawrence (qtd. by Williams, The Country and the City, 264), who was describing the incursion of industry, specifically mining, into the farm country where he grew up. But this description also amplifies the larger incursion of empire into the colonies. “Distant lands,” remarked Williams, within the colonial matrix of England, “became rural areas of industrial Britain,” appendages, in effect, with heavy consequent effects on its own surviving countryside (see 280–281). Yeats’s comments and his allusion to Mallarmé are from Yeats, Autobiography, 268. This pastoral tradition, Williams writes (The Country and the City, 281), is textured in the “green language” of early Romantics such as John Clare, one that is “ever green.”What is achieved against this experience of pain and loss,Williams explains of this lexicon,“is a way of feeling, which is also a way of writing.”Within this everexpanding pastoral, one is compelled to travel further out—or, as is the case with McKay, further in—for some sense of familiarity and connection to one’s own experiences of the country.The quotes are from McKay’s poem “International Soul,” in “New Poems,” James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven (hereafter, Johnson Collection). Political independence arose out “of these ‘country’ areas,” writes Williams, and accelerated as colonials were regularly enlisted to fight foreign wars of imperialism (The Country and the City, 283). In 1920, Basic English was promoted by C. K. Ogden as the medium for a new language that would reflect the diversity of the colonial world and unite it linguistically. This timidity was a characteristic of the so-called tragic generation, which fiercely clung to tradition while undermining and scrutinizing it.Yeats was referring to the lives of seeming disorder that many of these poets led as they sought, in verse, “the syntax of impulsive common life” (Autobiography, 250). I play on the word inveterate, used by critic Isobel Armstrong, to describe the kind of political discourse that overlaid the poetry of the late Victorian era. It is “inveterate political,” she explains, because it is “founded on debate and contest” (Victorian Poetry, 13). Armstrong describes the late Victorian period as a “condition of crisis.” And the ways poets responded to it had less to do with their political orientation than with the economic and cultural upheaval brought about by the incursion into and out of the country—and, of course, the world (ibid., 385).Victorian modernists, and I’m inclined to include McKay among them, did not perceive themselves as so modern

Notes to Pages 6–7

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as to rupture ties with the immediate past.Victorian modernists, in fact, begin the process of conceptualizing “the idea of culture as a category,” which now included the role of the artist within that definition. “To be modern was to be overwhelmingly secondary” (ibid., 3).Victorian poetry was also obsessed with displacements in the countryside, as well as in the colonies, and the effects of these changes on one’s relationship to city and country—and even helped to bring some of these changes about. “The problem of agency and consciousness, labour, language and representation become central.Teleology is displaced by epistemology and politics because relationships and their representation become the contested area, between self and society, self and labour, self and nature, self and language and above all between self and lover” (7). Qtd. in Roditi, Oscar Wilde, 107. “Old England,” Dialect Poetry of Claude McKay, 63–65. Munich, Queen Victoria’s Secrets, 101. Henry James wrote of Queen Victoria’s passing:“I mourn the safe and motherly old middle-class queen, who held the nation warm under the fold of her big hideous Scotch-plaid shawl.” This “ethnic shawl,” notes Adrienne Munich, was open to all her peoples, and her “common cloak” became a symbol for stability ( James qtd. in Munich, Queen Victoria’s Secrets, 78). Even though Queen Victoria spent much of her reign within “the small radius of London,Windsor, Balmoral, and the Isle of Wight, and for many years in near seclusion,” Janet Wilson tells us, she had a presence throughout the British Empire (“Queen Victoria in the Funnyhouse,” 235). One teacher pointed to a picture of the solemn queen and told a “beautiful story,” McKay recalled, of an encounter with an awestruck and enchanted African chief who traveled to London to ask the secret of her power.The source of her divinity, to the African, seemed to emanate from an idyllic—even poetic—realm. Of course, McKay realized, it was the Bible that Victoria pointed to as the secret to her power (“Up to Date,” 1–2). David Cannadine notes (Ornamentalism, 123) that the English were more likely to be concerned “with rank than with race, and with the appreciation of status similarities based on perceptions of affinity,” viewing the inhabitants of their empire, as they usually did those of the metropolis, in individual terms.The way this maternal imperialism holds itself together, Cannadine explains, is in the fetishization of the ornamental. McKay spent less than six months in the constabulary, which secured his footing within the empire, but he abruptly left after an affair with a fellow cadet. “Old England.” Rupert Brooke, “The Soldier” (1914). Of the same generation as McKay, Brooke visited Europe, Canada, the United States, and the South Seas. He was commissioned as an officer during World War I and wrote a series of poems, while on leave in 1914, called “The War Sonnets,” which included “The Soldier.” Brooke died in 1915 en route to Gallipoli. Of course, “renewal” implies some degree of sexual assignation as well. Like those depictions of the Virgin Mary with her robe opened as an enticement to all people, Munich explains, Queen Victoria’s “large biological family proved her capacity” (101). Routes and roots are vastly important for writers in the early twentieth century, particularly those of the African diaspora.They are, Stuart Hall explains,“the different staging posts that we have been through in our lives, collectively and individually.” McKay’s choice of a route through horticulture, however, had more to do with reappropriating an aesthetic object, such as the flower or garden within the English tradition. Hall’s use of the word post signals larger unresolved historical tensions that have to do with theory: “Post-colonial and post-national and post-modern and post-enlightenment and all of those things are clearly quite there, are serious issues

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Notes to Pages 7–8

of theory, theoretical development and conceptual development which we have not really talked about seriously and consistently” (Hall,“Random Thoughts,” 1). Jamaica was, among all the colonies, considered a jewel, unblemished by the encroachments of modern society, one of the attractions for dissidents such as Walter Jekyll, the governor and Fabian socialist Sydney Olivier, the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, and the Scottish poet and editor Thomas “RedCam” MacDermot. All would touch McKay, whose poems of the folklore and country in Jamaica were renowned throughout the commonwealth. It seemed to many that society overseas was “purer, more stable, less corrupted,” writes Cannadine. “As the metropolis became ever more urbanized, industrialized, and democratized, and as its social fabric correspondingly decayed, these faraway societies, with their traditional hierarchies still intact, not only became more appealing, they also needed protecting from the very same forces of modernity that were destroying traditional Britain” (Ornamentalism, 67). Given the midcentury craze for plant collecting, Adrienne Munich tells us, the English would colonize the horticultural world as well. “Botanists scoured remote corners of the earth for unique specimens, only the most astonishing of which bore royal names” (Queen Victoria’s Secrets, 212). G. Jekyll,“Horticulture in 1899,” Garden, January 13, 1900, 1. Equiano wrote one of the most famous slave narratives of the eighteenth century, The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gistavus Vassa, the African. He made every effort to obtain his freedom and “to return to Old England.”To do this, however, required “a knowledge of Navigation”:“for though I did not intend to run away unless I should be ill used, yet, in such a case if I understood navigation, I might attempt my escape in a sloop, which was one of the swiftest sailing vessels in the West-Indies, and I could be at no loss for hands to join me” (90). Equiano’s eventual mastery of navigation helped him produce a unique slave narrative. McKay,“Up to Date,” 1–2. McKay’s poem “I Shall Return,” quoted here, was first published in England in Cambridge Magazine, summer 1920, 58. It was later retitled “The Years Between” (“New Poems,” Johnson Collection). I see this poem as reestablishing a literary tradition begun in Jamaica with McKay’s mentor, the Englishman Walter Jekyll.An abbreviated version appeared in the “Songs for Jamaica” section of Selected Poems of Claude McKay as “I Shall Return,” giving the impression that the poem reflected a spiritual return to Jamaica. See James,“Becoming the People’s Poet,” 18–19, for another interpretation of the poem. McKay, “I Shall Return.” McKay encountered a world in which new “rural societies” such as Jamaica entered the English imagination, Williams tells us. “From about 1880 there was then this dramatic extension of landscape and social relations. There was also a marked development of the idea of England as ‘home’ in that special sense of which ‘home’ is a memory and an ideal” (The Country and the City, 281–282). Williams, The Country and the City, 281. Hall,“Thinking the Diaspora,” 8. McKay mimicked and reconfigured the Victorian double poem, a style that produces “two concurrent poems,” according to Armstrong, while using “the same words” (Victorian Poetry, 12). It is word play but also involves a Hegelian sense of doubleness, upon which W.E.B. Du Bois built his veil of double consciousness. Stuart Hall rightly sees this positioning as part of a larger diasporic movement. In McKay’s hands, this doubleness works in the expressive realm (for McKay, the dialect), as well as the epistemological realm that connects him to a world of ideas and discourse. Hall,“Thinking the Diaspora,” 8. Ibid., 16.

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34. This becoming is the foundation upon which Homi Bhabha mounts his concept of a “New Internationalism.” It includes “narratives of cultural and political diaspora,” the theorist notes, “the major social displacements of peasant and aboriginal communities, the poetics of exile, the grim prose of political and economic refugees.” It too is a place out of which “something begins its presencing” (“Life at the Border,” 30). It is also an aesthetic stance in the way it compromises the integrity of a singular traditional mode of articulation. 35. Hall,“Thinking the Diaspora,” 8. 36. McKay,“Note of Harlem,” in “New Poems,” 18. 37. Hall,“Thinking the Diaspora,” 10. 38. I improvise upon Peter Hitchcock’s discussion of Caribbean aesthetics based on a “cartography of resistance” (“Antillanité and the Art of Resistance,” 33). Edward Said devotes a lengthy section to this decolonizing cultural resistance, which he characterizes as “the voyage in” (Culture and Imperialism, 216). 39. “ ‘The Maroons, slaves in the West Indies,’ Danticat explains,‘went into hiding in the hills to establish a base for attack; thus, maroonage refers to something covertly, trying to protect the self ’ ” (Shea,“Traveling Words with Edwidge Danticat,” 48). 40. The term décalage comes from Leopold Sédar Senghor’s “Problématique de la Négritude” (1977), cited and translated in Edwards,“The Uses of Diaspora.” 41. Edouard Glissant comments on location in analyzing Caribbean verse as a “search elsewhere for the principle of domination, which is not evident in the country itself ” (Caribbean Discourse, 20, 23). Hall writes: “Cultures, of course, have their ‘locations.’ But it is no longer easy to say where they originate.What we can chart is more kin to a process of repetition-with-difference, or reciprocity-withoutbeginning” (“Thinking the Diaspora,” 14). 42. Ralph Ellison’s closing comments in Invisible Man (New York: Signet, 1947) are relevant here:“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (503). 43. Edwards,“The Uses of Diaspora,” 65. 44. Ibid., 10, 16. 45. McKay,“Song of Birth,” in “New Poems.” 46. According to Kim Butler, diaspora is characterized by dispersal to several sometimes consecutive destinations; a relationship to an actual or imaginary homeland; and an acquired self-awareness or group identity. Diaspora involves a scattering, which is “a necessary precondition for the formation of links between the various populations in diaspora.” Diasporas also tend to be multigenerational and to “combine the individual migration experience with the collective history of group dispersal.” Butler tells us that “while all diasporas may be ‘imagined communities,’ only communities imagined in certain ways are diasporas” (“Defining Diaspora,” 192; see also Edwards,“The Uses of Diaspora”). 47. McKay wrote on Garveyism in his essay “Garvey as a Negro Moses” for the Liberator, April 1922, when he was executive editor. “Garveyism,” the preferred usage in the 1920s for the black diaspora, was entangled with residual imperialisms. This partly explains the term’s unpopularity among writers such as McKay, who called it “a well-worn word in Negro New York.” Garveyism hardly connoted racial or even cultural identity but was considered “curiously bourgeois-obsolete and fantastically utopian.” 48. McKay,“Travail,” Workers’ Dreadnought, January 10, 1920. 49. Edwards reminds us that one should think of diaspora broadly,“not in terms of some closed or autonomous system of African dispersal” but as “a complex past of forced migrations and racialization” (“The Uses of Diaspora,” 64).This shift in perspective, however, does not invalidate the agency of a historical diaspora in the sense of African and Jewish dispersal. In spite of everything, Hall explains, race is still conceived of as “the guilty secret, the hidden code, the unspeakable trauma,” particu-

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larly in the Caribbean. And it is this trauma that must never be lessened as we overlap and multiply our perspectives. “It is ‘Africa’ that has made it ‘speakable,’ as a social and cultural condition of our existence,” Hall writes (14). McKay moved to New York from Kansas to marry Eulalie Imelda Lewars and to open a business. Much of McKay’s life in New York is documented in detail in Cooper’s Claude McKay and his years in Jamaica in James’s Fierce Hatred of Injustice. Other biographies include Tillery, Claude McKay, and Giles, Claude McKay. William Maxwell, editor of Complete Poems of Claude McKay, has written an informative introduction to the collection that places many of the poems in relationship to the larger world. Gayle’s Claude McKay gives a solid appraisal of McKay’s lyrics. McKay, in “Significant Books Reviewed by Their Authors,” conducted by James Clarke, McClure’s, June 1928, 81. McKay studied Jamaican culture and folk tunes and was a source for Walter Jekyll’s 1907 Jamaican Song and Story. By the time McKay arrived in New York, the country was thoroughly familiar to him as a poet and ethnographer, and so he was completely taken by this newer composite. Max Forester Eastman (1883–1969), who would play a significant role in shaping McKay’s work, was born into an abolitionist family in Canandaigua, in northern New York, and attended Mercersburg Academy and Williams College. He later studied philosophy with John Dewey at Columbia College, where he taught a course in logic for three years before embarking on a career as a U.S. radical and editor. He edited and wrote introductions to both Harlem Shadows (1922) and Selected Poems of Claude McKay (1953). He was an iconic U.S. radical, strikingly handsome, remarked McKay, and a bit of a womanizer. In the 1950s, Eastman espoused a type of U.S. exceptionalism that colluded with McCarthyism, and he eventually denounced many of his comrades from the days when he edited the Masses. In the June 1928 issue of McClure’s, McKay wrote:“Harlem was my first positive reaction to American life. . . . After two years in the blue-sky desert of Kansas, it was like entering a paradise of my people” (81). Originally titled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” the lead essay in the Survey Graphic for March 1, 1925, was titled “Harlem” and focused on the community’s international cosmopolitanism. Upon this fertile ground, Locke introduced the “New Negro” in the essay that followed, “Enter the New Negro.” “Negro Dancers,” a poem that expands on Harlem’s geography, appeared in the New Negro:An Interpretation, published by Boni, but did not appear in the original Survey Graphic’s “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” issue of March 1, 1925. Braithwaite, writing in the April 1919 issue of the Crisis, found that McKay’s sensibility differed “in both visionary and artistic power from anything so far produced by the poets of the race” (“Some Contemporary Poets,” 278). Dunbar, Sport of the Gods (New York: Collier, 1970), particularly “In New York,” 70–79; originally published in 1903, Dunbar’s is one of the century’s first works about Harlem and the migrations from the South. See Braithwaite, “The Negro in American Literature,” for his evaluation of Dunbar’s work. Locke, “Harlem: Mecca,” 630; quotes in the paragraph that follows appear on the same page. Claude McKay made note of the peculiarities of this creative and cultural expatriation in his autobiography A Long Way from Home: “And it was something with which my fellow-expatriates could sympathize but which they could not all together understand. For they were not black like me. Not being black and unable to see deep into the profundity of blackness, some even thought that I might have preferred to be white like them” (245). W.E.B. Du Bois in “Critiques of Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven,” in David Levering Lewis, The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (New York: Viking, 1994), 107.

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59. S. Cooper,“Concepts of Internationalism,” 26. 60. Of this impasse, Adam Hochschild in King Leopold’s Ghost estimates that from 1880 to 1920 roughly ten to twenty million people in the Belgium Congo alone were eliminated by force, disease, or poverty.This figure exceeds the capacity for destruction of our most lethal and modern weapons today. 61. Douglass’s internationalism is expressed as intermediacy, or modern vernacular that is first encoded through biology, then works at the political in resolving injustice. Sydney Olivier echoed those sentiments in “The White Man’s Burden at Home.” In contrast, Stuart Hall interprets vernacular more as a cultural “accentuation” and “a new kind of transnational, even postnational, transcultural consciousness” (“Thinking the Diaspora,” 17). An editorial in the Messenger in August 1919 recommended internationalism as “the method of the future.” 62. Ogden published his study Bentham’s Theory of Fictions (London: Kegan Paul,Trench, Trubner) in 1932. It was Bentham’s advocacy of universal public education (and the founding of the University of London in 1827) that rallied Ogden to confront Cambridge University, which Virginia Woolf likened to a giant aquarium of crayfish moving sideways, and its admissions policy that brazenly excluded women and colonials. (Even in the 1920s, almost all reputable institutions of higher learning practiced such discrimination openly.) Ogden organized lectures and meetings, formed an intellectual group called the Heretics, and edited the pacifist Cambridge Magazine, where McKay’s poems appeared. 63. Hall’s descriptions of diaspora sound a lot like choreography, using terms such as joining up and giving expression to desires and aspirations. See “Race, Articulation, and Societies,” 4. 64. The dance floor offended many black intellectuals, Du Bois among them. About McKay’s Home to Harlem, a novel that dealt with that footloose world of speakeasies and cabarets, Du Bois remarked: “After the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath” (“Two Novels,” Norton Anthology of African American Literature [New York: Norton, 1997], 759–760; reprinted from Crisis, June 1928). 65. McKay to Cunard, September 18, 1932, Cunard Collection.“Every crime,” McKay explains in The Negroes in America, “be it class inequality, lynch law, or the exploitation of labor—is concealed in the fetish of sex as behind a smoke screen.‘The white woman must be protected from rape by blacks’: that is the slogan of America.‘Don’t allow the mixing of races!’ ” He was shocked that Negro leaders and white reformers defended “such American taboos against mixed marriages and the right to freely and completely (on an equal footing)” meet “with whites in social places and in private homes” (76, 90). Frederick Douglass broke one of those taboos when he married Helen Pitts, a white suffragist, in 1884. 66. Hall,“Thinking the Diaspora,” 10. 67. McKay,“The Barrier,” Selected Poems of Claude McKay, 80. 68. McKay to Jackman, May 9, 1928, Johnson Collection. 69. Ibid., 1934, Johnson Collection. 70. McKay to Jackman, May 9, 1928, Johnson Collection. A postscript to McKay’s romantic encounters with the Victorian on modernity’s dance floor is this notion of the religious and the many ways it is expressed through poetry. McKay was a deeply religious poet. Isobel Armstrong remarks that Victorian verse seemed to be obsessed with religion and consequently “is arguably the last theological poetry to be written” (Victorian Poetry, 3). 71. This protectiveness was part of that larger closet of protégés Locke groomed; see Schwarz, Gay Voices, for an intriguing read of Locke’s New Negro subculture. The New Negro had a radical edge as well, conveyed in the Messenger’s September 1919 editorial; citing McKay’s “If We Must Die,” it proclaimed:“The New Negro has arrived with stiffened back bone, dauntless manhood, defiant eyes, steady hand and a

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73.

74.

75.

76.

77.

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will of iron.” (September 1919, 4). But many others also thought along internationalist lines, such as Frederick Douglass, Ida B.Wells-Barnett, Martin Delany,A. Philip Randolph,W. A. Domingo, and Hubert Harrison. Locke, “Harlem: Mecca,” 630; Locke, “Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane,” 457; Brooks, “Enterprise,” 60.This was how McKay interpreted Locke’s Harlem experiment:“He had brought the best examples of their work together in a pioneer book. But from the indication of his appreciations it was evident that he could not lead a Negro renaissance” (A Long Way from Home, 313). Tillery, in Claude McKay, brings up the issue of the FBI’s surveillance of McKay.The classified information Tillery received under the Freedom of Information Act included passages that build on yet another facet of McKay’s complex life: his alleged bisexuality or homosexuality. Even today, McKay’s sexuality is discussed guardedly along contemporary normative lines—never politically or historically. But that Victorian dandy persona so alluring to McKay was also integrated into a type of international sexual outlaw or rogue that threatened the status quo. A black sexual rebel was considered a very serious threat by the FBI. The race leader W.E.B. Du Bois was convinced of the efficacy of propaganda, to be used against “a dusty desert of dollars and smartness” in the United States, he wrote in Souls of Black Folk, which appeared in 1903; “all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence” (11–12). He became convinced, however, as did Locke and others, that integration could be achieved only through the manipulation of artistic expression. His comments on propaganda appeared in “Criteria of Negro Art,” published in 1926 in the Crisis, a year after the New Negroes’ debut in Harlem. Du Bois’s advocacy of propaganda has been a sore point in twentieth-century African American expression, yet it comes out of a sense of urgency, shared by many early in the century, that saw black artistic expression as a possible agent for social change. This debate is sharply delineated in Harris, “The Great Debate.” McKay, “Significant Books Reviewed by Their Authors,” McClure’s, June 1928, 81. Ironically, in “The Negro in American Literature,” which appeared in the volume New Negro:An Interpretation,William Stanley Braithwaite dismissed McKay as a “violent and strident propagandist, using his poetic gifts to clothe arrogant and defiant thoughts.”The “pure lyric dreamer” who contemplated “life and nature with a wistful sympathetic passion hovers for a moment, pardonably perhaps, over the race problem,” which Braithwaite equates with bad literature, “but its highest allegiance is to Poetry—it must soar” (40). In such works as “If We Must Die,” Braithwaite saw a poet “enmeshed in this dilemma” of the race problem, “caught between the currents of the poetry of protest and the poetry of expression” (40). “When I returned from abroad in 1935,” McKay remarked, “the Communists thought that perhaps they could corral me. But I did not bite the bait. So, they said it was a pity I had not died abroad. Then they might have used me dead” (“Right Turn to Catholicism,” 18, Arthur Schomburg Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York City [hereafter, Schomburg Collection]). In April 1939, around the time McKay was summoned before the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, he wrote “Mandel,” a friendly witness, that he had no stomach for being a son of a bitch. “I would be betraying my conscience and there is no Judas in my make-up.” But there were others, he surmised, who had the “authentic first-hand stuff ” and would gladly divulge it (McKay to Mandel, September 28, 1939, Johnson Collection). As to his inability to fit into this U.S. paradigm of the Left and Right, McKay confessed that he was an incurable “iconoclast and very much of an individualist and dissenter.” Still, when U.S. intellectuals, particularly the “Niggerratti” who promoted the Harlem Renaissance,“discovered that

Notes to Pages 16–17

78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

83. 84.

85. 86.

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I was not what they thought I was, they dropped me like a hot potato” (“Right Turn to Catholicism,” 17–19). Max Eastman, introduction, Selected Poems of Claude McKay, 7. Eastman qtd. in Tillery, Claude McKay, 181. Shaw qtd. in McKay, A Long Way from Home, 61, 64. The New Masses, edited by Mike Gold, erroneously described McKay as living the rich and leisured life around the sidewalk cafes of Montmartre. In A Long Way from Home, McKay commented wryly:“ ‘The sidewalk cafés of Montmartre’ held no special attraction for me. Attractive as Paris is, I have never stayed there for a considerable length of time. . . . I appreciated, but was not especially enamored of Paris, perhaps because I have never had the leisure necessary to make an excellent clubman. If I had to live in France, I would prefer life among the fisherfolk of Douarnenez, or in the city of Strassburg, or in sinister Marseilles” (230).These self-proclaimed “proletarian ambassadors,” he noted, who criticized his behavior or disposition seemed to posture themselves more as “holy messengers” of a ramshackle vanguard than as popular revolutionists (“Soviet Russia and the Negro,” Crisis, January 1924, 115). Locke commented on the Harlem scene, some ten years later: “Today, with that same Harlem prostrate in the grip of the depression and throes of social unrest, we confront the sobering facts of a serious relapse and premature setback.” He was upbeat, however, and noted that “what we face in Harlem today is the first scene of the next act,” which he described as a “prosy ordeal of the reformation with its stubborn tasks of economic reconstruction” (“Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane,” 457). McKay, “Right Turn to Catholicism,” 2. “Would the English care to change their monarchial form of government for our Republican?” McKay asked in the same essay. “And the Swedes, the Danes, the Norwegians? When we export Democracy will we also export our Divorces and Comic Strips, our Slang and Swing music, our Gangsterism and Lobbies, our Mistreatment of Minorities and Lynchings?” (16). Ibid., 25.This was one of many rhymes McKay devised and sang as a child. Cedric Dover was editor of the New Outlook, which he started in 1925 with W.E.B. Du Bois’s blessings. He was the author of Brown Phoenix (London: College Press, 1950) and in the 1930s planned to collaborate with McKay on East Indian–West Indian, a collection of essays that reflected on their experiences in the Caribbean and abroad. Dover was also a choice to write an introduction to McKay’s selected poems, which might have given the book an entirely different slant. In one of his letters to McKay, Dover suggested that the poet write a longish account of himself that “will say something of the moods, circumstances, events and places in which the poems took shape, and all the reactions to them” (Dover to McKay, Johnson Collection). Dover’s Half-Caste, published in London in 1937, was cited in the 1940s by justices in the United States as an argument against the legal restrictions on mixed-race marriage. He is also the author of American Negro Art, which appeared in 1960. In 1951, Du Bois’s own affinities with the “fold” came under attack, and he was indicted by the U.S. government for having associated with the Peace Information Center. He went into exile ten years later. Dover also mentions other “anti-progressive” influences that soured McKay’s reputation as a militant black poet (see Dover to Du Bois, November 4, 1950, Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, 193–194).The quote referring to McKay as the leader of black revolt is from McKay’s discussion of the poem “If We Must Die” and appears in Bontemps, Anthology of Negro Poets in the U.S.A.:Two Hundred Years (audio CD, 1988). McKay did not consider this a compliment, however. Even the category “Negro” was irritating to McKay, who wrote in “Right Turn to Catholicism”:“The Negro American is not only a physical fact, he is also a state of mind. Even Europeans, who are not anti-Negro at home, catch the disease as soon as they arrive in America.Yet Communists, and some of their ‘liberal’ friends, imagine that they can

152

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88.

89.

90.

Notes to Pages 17–17

ride rough-shod over this beautifully delicate dilemma.” As for McKay’s joining the Catholic Church, many tried to persuade him against this move. McKay wrote of one friend, a nonconformist, who asked, “ ‘Don’t you know that Catholic nations are the most loose and backward in the world?’Yes, I said, that may or may not be true, but I prefer them” (21, 12). Eastman to McKay, September 9, 1946, Schomburg Collection. Eastman switched in the 1950s from extreme leftist radical to huckster of U.S. exceptionalism. He admired Joseph McCarthy at one point and condemned some of his old radical friends, such as Dorothy Day and Floyd Dell. He was never a pacifist, and his internationalism ended with the outbreak of World War I, unlike that of his sister Crystal Eastman and McKay; they continued as committed internationalists in the postwar years. Crystal Eastman eventually moved to England, where she continued her advocacy for international feminism as a contributor to the feminist magazine Time and Tide.Another admirer of McCarthy, the Harlem critic George Samuel Schuyler, debated McKay in the 1930s on his political position regarding the Negro in America (“Should Negroes Lose Themselves Racially,” Amsterdam News, June 5, 1937, 13). McKay wrote “Right Turn to Catholicism” in response to fears and prejudices that seemed directed toward Roman Catholics in general during this time. His connection with the Catholic Worker organization was minimal and only through Day and her newspaper, the Catholic Worker.“I’m not a Catholic Worker in the generally accepted sense any more than I am a Negro writer,” McKay remarked.“I happen to be a Negro who is a writer and a converted Catholic, who is a writer” (McKay to Carl Cowl,August 28, 1947, Johnson Collection). McKay and Day may have met as early as 1918, when Day was an editorial assistant to Floyd Dell at the Masses, and later at the Liberator, where McKay was editor. Day was also a novelist and poet. (The Eleventh Virgin, her second novel, is based on those early radical experiences; her poem “Mulberry Street” appeared in the July 1917 issue of the Masses.) In the 1940s, as editor of the Catholic Worker, Day published McKay’s verse. But even today, Day’s legacy has been undermined, with the decision several years ago to destroy her famous retreat cottage on Staten Island, which was a haven to many dissidents and spiritual rebels such as McKay. Eastman to McKay, 1946, Johnson Collection. McKay’s reputation improved a bit by the 1950s. Eastman attempted to redefine McKay as an anti-Communist, supposedly to protect his reputation as a black poet, perhaps thinking that describing McKay as a political dilettante would save him from the blacklist. “Keep mum before the public,” Eastman pleaded to McKay.“Let your heroic record stand.” Eastman attacked the poet for “mouthing the Stalin propaganda” and asked McKay to refrain from public statements that would jeopardize the poet’s “name in history” (Eastman to McKay, September 9, 1946. Schomburg Collection). Sometime later, McKay wrote Carl Cowl, his agent, that Eastman had become “so warped in his hatred of Stalinism that he has changed into a hater of the Russian revolution, and the Russian people” (McKay to Cowl, July 9, 1947, Johnson Collection). Roman Catholicism made its mark on McKay in Europe, where he became enchanted by its simplicity, its unnamed desires, and the sublimity of its artistic expression:“It was particularly in Spain, as I came to know and understand the people and visited the marvelous cathedrals, that I fell in love with Catholicism.” Later, McKay relied upon it as a third way around the production-based ideologies of capitalism and communism. In Catholicism,“there was room for any individual, rich or poor,” he explained. In it, he believed, there was freedom without license,“and one could have faith and hope and still believe in humanity” (“Right Turn to Catholicism,” 1, 3). Many in the Victorian era, as well, such as Oscar Wilde and John Ruskin, looked to that same simplicity for answers to their aesthetic questions. Oscar Wilde

Notes to Pages 17–19

91.

92. 93.

94. 95.

96.

97.

98.

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believed that the aesthetics of Catholicism best expressed the Romantic spirit, that combining of sorrow and joy, in a definition of beauty. Like McKay, Wilde identified lifestyle with aesthetics and the beautiful with the good.“But his new conception of the beautiful or good, as in some of the writings of Baudelaire or of some Catholic mystics, included ‘sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection,’ stations in the progress of the predestined who must necessarily see the light if salvation in the darkness of sin.The perfect man was thus, as in The Soul of Man under Socialism, the true individualist who lives ‘completely for the moment’ and is saved from his sins ‘simply for beautiful moments’ in his life” (Roditi, Oscar Wilde, 128–129). Addison Gayle Jr. was one of the few critics at the time who seemed to understand the significance of McKay’s broad reach, equating the resistance to it among white and black intellectuals as “cultural warfare.” McKay saw the world, he noted, “in three-dimensional configurations” (Claude McKay, 17–18). Hughes, in Arna Bontemps–Langston Hughes Letters, 470. McKay was quite clear about having no associations with “the Negro Renaissance” and wrote Carl Cowl, his agent, that no mention of it should be used in any publicity of his books. “My first book was published in 1912, long before there was a Negro Renaissance, my second book in 1913, the third in 1920 and the fourth and first American book in 1922. I wrote through the hectic period of the so-called Negro Renaissance and I am still writing after it has subsided” (McKay to Cowl, July 21, 1947, Johnson Collection). Edward Said qtd. in Wilson, The Victorians, 237. Wilson explains that postcolonial writers “appropriate such images” to engage in a form of what Said calls a decolonizing cultural resistance, which he discusses at length in Culture and Imperialism. McKay refers to “our Missis Queen,Victoria de good,” in his poems, a term used by many native Jamaicans to characterize their sovereign. And in fact, in his early ballads, he assumes the persona of a Renaissance sonneteer singing the praises of a “faerie queene,” never directly but always in metaphor. McKay wrote a dedication to “Rise and Fall”:“Thoughts of Burns—with apologies to his immortal spirit for making him speak in Jamaican dialect” (Songs of Jamaica, 100). Like McKay, Robert Burns had a sharp wit but was praised as a rustic plowman from the countryside of Scotland. He too wrote in dialect, and he sought to preserve the oral legends of his Scottish folk culture as McKay did for Jamaica in Songs of Jamaica. Burns was considered a pre-Romantic poet who worked against the dominant tradition of the age, neoclassicism. In that way, he, like McKay, wrote a kind of poetics of resistance. The English notion of “the little place in the country,” writes Williams, was the real place, a notion vigorously disseminated in the colonies as well, especially in the late Victorian period: “The birds and trees and rivers of England; the natives speaking, more or less one’s own language: these were the terms of many imagined and actual settlements. The country, now, was a place to retire to” (The Country and the City, 281–282). McKay’s appeal to sophisticated Londoners lay in his skillful use of dialect and English metaphors. During the period in which McKay came of age, writes Raymond Williams, England became home as “a memory and an ideal. Some of the images are of central London: the powerful, the prestigious and the consuming capital. But many are of an idea of rural England: its green peace contrasted with the tropical or arid places of actual work; its sense of belonging, of community, idealised by contrast with the tensions of colonial rule” (ibid.).These fantasies of a homeland, later scholars of diaspora studies have found, are really “part of a project of constructing diasporan identity, rather than homeland actuality” (Kim Butler,“Defining Diaspora,” 205; italics in original). “A Dream,” in McKay, Songs of Jamaica.

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Notes to Pages 19–21

100. Suffrage was a newsworthy item in the colonies as well.The Gleaner, the daily newspaper in Kingston, Jamaica, for instance, printed full-page photographs of protesting women in uniform, as well as daily reports of courageous women hunger strikers, and McKay makes pointed reference to them in several other poems as well.The allusion to Queen Victoria as a reincarnation of Edmund Spenser’s “faerie queene” was in currency among writers at the time and appears in children’s books as well, such as The Fairies Favourites in 1897, showcased at Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (see Munich, Queen Victoria’s Secrets, 31). 101. “We must leave the appreciation of what we are doing,” McKay remarked, “to the emancipated Negro intelligentsia of the future” (McKay to James Weldon Johnson, April 30, 1928, Johnson Collection). 102. The appeal of the decadent lifestyle, notes A. N. Wilson in The Victorians, was not limited to the privileged upper classes: “What it offered was the capacity for selfinvention, for making the world into anything you wanted it to be. For that reason it was actually of particular appeal to those whose incomes did not run to employing many servants, and whose outer lives were limited by the crushing restraints of petty bourgeois semi-poverty” (553).Yeats was of a similar opinion, though he seemed more curious to know their nocturnal ways. One evening, when Yeats visited the poet Lionel Johnson, Johnson was having breakfast while Yeats and others dined. Johnson spent the rest of the night reading theology, writing lyrics, and drinking. “As for living,” Johnson remarked famously, “our servants will do that for us” (Wilson, The Victorians, 553). McKay, who experimented with hashish, was a notorious bisexual, tutored a young Jackman into the libertine ways of the decadent, and eventually settled in Tangier, where his licentious eye could roam freely. He was formally introduced into this brotherhood in 1920, in London, through C. K. Ogden and others. 103. “La Paloma in London” appeared in the Liberator, January 1922. Likewise, Armstrong explains, Swinburne wrote poetry of desire, “the consuming, exhausting desire, which needs to be ever stimulated and expanded.” Such a restless prosody was “ever seeking new objects, ever striving to maintain and energize itself ” (Victorian Poetry, 419). 104. This encounter between Harris and McKay occurred in 1918 when the full extent of the brutality in East St. Louis, Illinois, made headlines in all the newspapers: Forty residents were murdered, burned, and lynched in July 1917, when gleeful whites went on a rampage that drove nearly six thousand residents from their homes.The violence was precipitated by the recruitment of African Americans to work in the war industries.A report, History of the East St. Louis, Illinois, Riot, by Ida B.Wells, who collected interviews with some fifty people, later corroborated the outrages. The U.S. government, however, classified the report and did not make it available until 1986. 105. Bontemps, Anthology of Negro Poets. 106. “The future of American Negroes,” McKay remarked, “whether they become the pawn of the bourgeoisie in its fight against white labor or whether they become class-conscious, depends on the nature of the propaganda that is conducted among them” (McKay,“The Racial Question,” 817). 107. This history of ideology has reached an endpoint, according to some scholars, due to the overwhelming success of Western liberal democracy. Francis Fukayama, a proponent of this way of thinking, proclaimed the triumph of Western liberalism in his provocative 1989 essay “The End of History?” which appeared in the National Interest. But even Fukuyama suggests that liberal democracies can easily swing toward more authoritarian—even aristocratic—regimes given the right conditions, as we see today.The discourse on this history of ideology begins at the end of the Renaissance, with Francis Bacon’s Ideology as Science of Ideas (1620), finds articulation in the

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French Revolution (de Tracy), and becomes dialectical with The Communist Manifesto (1848). As early as 1960, Daniel Bell in The End of Ideology argued against ideological struggle and predicted the success of liberal democracies over other regimes. That has proved accurate—up to a point. We are still at an impasse in the posthistorical age as to why resistance persists throughout the world. 108. Said, Culture and Imperialism, xiv. Edward Said devotes considerable attention to Conrad’s muddle. “What Conrad discerned as the futility latent in imperialist philanthropy—whose intentions include such ideas as ‘making the world safe for democracy’—the United States government is still unable to perceive, as it tries to implement its wishes all over the globe, especially in the Middle East” (xviii). 109. “And now this great catastrophe [World War I] has come upon the world proving the real hollowness of nationhood, patriotism, racial pride and most of the things which one was taught to respect and reverence,” McKay wrote in an introduction to his poems (“A Negro Poet,” Pearson’s [September 1918]: 275–276). 110. Taggard edited and wrote an introduction to May Days: An Anthology of Verse from Masses-Liberator, which included works by McKay, Jean Toomer, e. e. cummings, Louis Ginsberg, Maxwell Bodenheim, Louis Untermeyer, Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl Sandburg, Louise Bogan, Mike Gold, Rose Pastor Stokes, and Edmund Wilson. “The Masses seems to have vanished from the gaze of the literary historian,” Taggard noted; “underground it went, to cut channels in the bed rock” (5). (For her comments on propaganda, see page 14.) These radicals were also “obsessed with the unity of our life, the dance of it, and when they found themselves, after following the dance with abandon for a time, they were no longer poets, . . . a fatal social-mindedness that made being artists a temptation which they put aside somewhat reluctantly, for pressing matters in hand” (8). 111. The lines are from the poem “Battle,” published in Workers’ Dreadnought, October 9, 1920, under the pseudonym Hugh Hope.“It was not until I first came to Europe in 1919,” explained McKay,“that I came to a full realization and understanding of the effectiveness of the insidious propaganda in general that is maintained against the Negro race. And it was not by the occasional affront of the minority of civilized fiends—mainly those Europeans who had been abroad, engaged in the business of robbing colored peoples in their native land—that I gained my knowledge, but rather through the questions about the Negro that were put to me by genuinely sympathetic and cultured persons (“Soviet Russia and the Negro,” 61–62). 112. “Darky” is a term of endearment for Max Eastman, who used it in introducing U.S. readers to McKay’s verse in 1922.Winston James explains that McKay would have stood out even in Jamaica, because he was black and from a family that was relatively prosperous. “This was a rare combination,” James explains. “For they lived in a Jamaica in which the masses of black Jamaicans, especially the darker ones, were not only poor but often desperate” (“Becoming the People’s Poet,” 20). 113. Eric Walrond, born in Georgetown, British Guiana, in 1898, moved to the United States in 1918 at the age of twenty. His only collection of stories, Tropic Death, was published in 1926; he died in London in 1966. His essay “The Negro Renaissance,” which appeared in the Gleaner,August 17, 1929, described McKay as emerging from “the shadows of European exile” to produce Home to Harlem and Banjo, set in “the Negro quarter” of Marseilles, which Walrond characterized as “a cess-pool of bums, coke sniffers, perverts, wharf rats, and jobless seamen” (1). McKay’s project,Walrond explained with a tinge of condescension, was to show how the novel’s main characters, Ray and others—those so-called “average Negroes”—were the “shock troops of democracy.” 114. Eastman’s comments relate to the internationalist mind, in general, and can be found in Understanding Germany:The Only Way to End the War and Other Essays (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1916), ix–xi.

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Notes to Pages 22–25

115. Claude McKay to Nancy Cunard, September 29, 1932, Cunard Collection. To Charles Henri Ford he wrote in defense of his libertine lifestyle:“And bohemian life is under fire right now—even from many of the former bohemians themselves who scared to death of the economic impasse are going in for politics and economics— subjects that the rococo ivory-tower bastards know naught of ” (McKay to Ford, April 12, 1935, Charles Henri Ford Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin).

C hapte r 2

1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

Th e M uddle of Empire

“The Dominant White,” from which the chapter epigraph is taken, appeared in the Liberator, April 1919, 20. Cowl, introduction, 7. “Negro Writer to His Critics” (New York Herald-Tribune, March 6, 1932), in Cooper, The Passion of Claude McKay, 137. McKay to Ogden, March 26, 1920, Ogden Papers.These feelings about the old style of rule under a royal patronage system were raised again when the author observed, firsthand, peasants’ rights being ignored by the Spanish revolutionists in Morocco. “By 1933, Republican flags were disappearing from the balconies of houses and hotels,” he explained,“where formerly they were so bravely displayed.And everywhere on the streets, in cafes, barber shops and other places, one heard the common people complaining that perhaps things were better under the king” (“Right Turn to Catholicism,” 8). McKay, A Long Way from Home, 63. Olivier reimagined himself as a “British West Indian” after nearly fifteen years in Jamaica. He wrote appreciatively of the countryside and its people ( Jamaica:The Blessed Island) and was a harsh critic of its English masters (The Myth of Governor Eyre). Recent critical assessments of his career as governor from 1907 to 1913, however, have been lukewarm. Historian Winston James, in A Fierce Hatred of Injustice, has tried to make a case for Olivier’s unpopularity and cites a series of uncomplimentary articles in the Gleaner. But in fact, beginning in October 1912, when it was rumored that Olivier would not seek another term, a number of highly laudatory pieces appeared in the newspaper and continued until Olivier left in January 1913. There was even a move to petition him to return as governor after World War I. But by that time, he was nearly sixty and had retired. [Hugh Hope], “Book Reviewed,” Workers’ Dreadnought, July 24, 1920; “Author’s Word,” in Harlem Shadows, xix–xxi. Shaw,“Some Impressions,” 12.This was Shaw’s characterization of the origins of the Fabian Society, which began in 1884. Olivier, Sydney Olivier, 74, 76, 78. Olivier, White Capital and Coloured Labour, 10. McKay, Banjo, 324.The modern era, McKay noted,“had leveled the world down to the point where it seemed treasonable for an advanced thinker to doubt that what was good for one nation or people, was also good for another” (324–325). Olivier, however, made that a policy in dealing with the colonies. Olivier,“A Champion of the Perverse,” To-Day, November 1886, 178. Olivier, “Perverse Socialism,” To-Day, August 1886, 50. In the same essay, Olivier writes that “the language habitually used on their behalf—with regard to politicians, economists, historians, contemporaries, who misunderstand Socialism, and all suspected of an influence antagonistic to the movement—would be ridiculous, if it could be believed to be sincere.” He called such language “wrongheaded” and “unprofitable” (47). Olivier wrote H. G. Wells that after “the intensive bombardment of our educational system which you and G.B.S. and others have been carrying on for more

Notes to Pages 25–30

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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than a whole generation,” he was amazed that socialists had failed “so absolutely” at “modifying the matrix out of which our dominant classes are moulded.” This middling “school-master class is continuous,” he pointed out, and completely insulated from “external influences” (Olivier to Wells, May 29, 1937, Sydney Olivier, 78, 171). Shaw,“Some Impressions,” 10. Olivier,“Not Much: A Fragment of Autobiography,” Sydney Olivier, 26. Olivier wrote Margaret Oliver, his wife, on May 9, 1907, after he was appointed governor, that their move to Jamaica felt “inevitable and determined,” as if some divine power or socialistic force had intervened (Sydney Olivier, 131, 135). A description of To-Day appears in “To Our Reader” (New Series, January 1884).The journal published literature, such as Walt Whitman’s “Resurgemus” and “An Indian Bureau Reminiscence” and plays by Henrik Ibsen and others. Contributors wrote on a range of topics, from executions in Russia (“Sophia Perovskaia,” executed on April 16, 1881, for attempting to assassinate the czar, written by H. Havelock Ellis, an advocate of sexual hedonism) to Darwinism (“Women and Socialism” and “Vegetarianism and Socialism”). It was an unorthodox mix in which Shaw’s “Unsocial Socialist” appeared alongside installments of Marx’s Capital. Olivier,“John Stuart Mill and Socialism,” To-Day 11 (1884): 500; Olivier,“Miss Cunard and the Negro,” New Statesman and Nation, March 10, 1934, 350–352; Shaw, “Some Impressions,” 13. Henry Champion, “Socialists of the Armchair,” To-Day, October 1886, 134. The Shaw quote appears in the preface to the 1908 edition, appended to Fabian Essays (1979 rpt.), 290. Olivier, White Capital and Coloured Labour, 162. Olivier, Sydney Olivier, 10, 14; Sydney Olivier to Margaret Olivier, February 7, 1884, ibid., 63; Shaw,“Some Impressions,” Sydney Olivier, 14. Olivier, White Capital and Coloured Labour, 27. McKay, too, was able to produce work that attacked race chauvinism. His poem “Black Fiend,” he explained, “goes for the black brute” and was a complement to “The White Fiend” and “Dominant White.” C. K. Ogden, McKay’s editor in England, selected “Black Fiend” for Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems, but McKay was against publishing it unless “White Fiend” appeared with it; he explained that “American coloured opinion won’t relish it” (McKay to Ogden, March 12, 1920, Ogden Papers). “The Little Peoples” is written as a conceit and plays on the double meaning of “little peoples.” McKay also has a more specific theme here: the League of Nations, which for many, such as Crystal Eastman, Sydney Olivier, and others whom McKay admired, offered the possibility of renewed hope, particularly in addressing grievances within the colonies. In reality, McKay implies, these “little people,” who are to be pitied, are not the colonized but Europeans. He also invokes the enigmatic “veil”—a playful nod to Du Bois’s racial consciousness—as an entry point into a shadowy league of “big men.” (The “little nations that are weak and white” might be a reference to Belgium, whose history of racial abuse in the Congo was infamous and whose differences with Germany over its African possessions would cause England to come to its aid.) For McKay, the colonial who walks “the new ways with the old dim eyes” is conveniently offered up in sacrifice to the “white world’s burden” of “greed and lust.” Olivier, League of Nations, 4; emphasis in the original. Olivier, White Capital and Coloured Labour, 26, 25. McKay,“New Poems,” Johnson Collection. Hurwitz and Hurwitz, Jamaica, 67. Olivier, White Capital and Coloured Labour, 25. Ibid., 26.

158

Notes to Pages 30–33

28. Clarkson was an eighteenth-century English abolitionist whom McKay wrote about in his poem “George William Gordon to the Oppressed Natives.” Frederick Douglass, whose slave narrative galvanized the abolitionist movement into a political cause, plays an important part in this late nineteenth century zeitgeist and may have anticipated the explosive terrain of those concerns of Olivier and McKay as early as 1869. In a December 7 lecture, the abolitionist remarked: “Europe and Africa are already here” (Frederick Douglass, “Composite Nationality: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on 7 December 1869”). Douglass began to think beyond race, and much like Oliver, saw the virtues in a hybrid society, which he called “intermediate” (Douglass, “The Future of the Negro,” North American Review, July 1884, in Frederick Douglass Papers, memory.loc.gov/ammem/doughtml/; see also Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass [New Haven:Yale University Press, 1999], 256). 29. Sydney Olivier, 33. 30. Olivier, White Capital and Coloured Labour, 15 31. Sydney Olivier, 36. 32. Fabianism and the Empire: A Manifesto, by the Fabian Society (London: G. Richards, 1900), 6, 10, 14. 33. It might have been titled Fabianism or Empire, but that would have defeated their purpose for a more unified radical transformation of society into one where everyone gets to dine on pie in their own kitchens. 34. Fabianism and the Empire, 278. During World War I, instead of a League of Nations to police the world’s resources, Olivier suggested that countries agree to a higher “supernational Law” that would promote cultural integrity:“As in regard to European and Asiatic subject communities, so in regard to the territories of primitive peoples, it must take account both of the manner in which authority has been hereto exercised and of the principle of ‘self-determination’.” Olivier was convinced that “the safeguards against the oppression of primitive peoples under European overlordship must be absolute” (Olivier, League of Nations, 12, 13). 35. McKay,“New Forces,” Liberator, July 1922. 36. “New Forces” appeared four months before Claude McKay spoke at the Fourth Congress of the Third International on the importance of a vanguard composed of workers from the industrialized and colonized countries. In contrast to the malaise after World War I, “New Forces” challenged the dystopic worldview of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, published that year. Revolutionary forces were on the minds of everyone, including Eliot, who saw “commercial vulgarization” advancing “with great industry.”This fear of the “degeneration” of culture was motivated by the phenomenon of the hybrid (T. S. Eliot, “A Preface to Modern Literature,” Vanity Fair, November 23, 1923, 44). McKay, in contrast, saw this hybrid as the embodiment of “awakened workers” (“Socialism and the Negro,” Workers’ Dreadnought, January 31, 1920, 1–2.) 37. Sydney Olivier,“Perverse Socialism,” 50. 38. Shaw, “Some Impressions,” 12–13. When Shaw visited Jamaica, he asked Olivier if “our democratic plan” was working. Olivier admitted that after he implemented native councils, all his socialistic ideas were opposed.“I now do not consult them. I do what is needed. In eighteen months or so they see that I was right, and stop howling.” He found the Creole council members negrophobic and narrow-minded. He consulted the Americans even less than his “infantile councils,” which he infuriated by giving “an important public appointment to a colored native over their heads” (ibid.). 39. James, A Fierce Hatred of Injustice, 83, 85. 40. Olivier,“White Man’s Burden at Home,” 16. 41. Shaw,“Some Impressions,” 13.Wallas, Shaw, and Olivier formed the Fabian Society in 1884 and often argued over political fine points. Shaw implied that Olivier did

Notes to Pages 33–37

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

56. 57.

159

not pass the buck to the police but failed in his attempts to win over the protestors, much to his regret. James, A Fierce Hatred of Injustice, 85 Sydney Olivier, 14. McKay’s relationship to Olivier was reminiscent of those of English poets of the Renaissance who wrote of their admiration and love for Queen Elizabeth. In Jamaica, however, McKay warned of peasant discontent and appealed to the governor’s liberalism. This was not so different from the mid–nineteenth century when colonials such as Paul Bogle and the abolitionist George William Gordon, during the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865, expressed their grievances directly to the queen. Eyre was governor during the rebellion. Opposition took the form of “passive resistance”—paying the two-pence fare in farthings and further slowing down the service by requesting a receipt (W. Cooper, Claude McKay, 52–53). Gleaner, February 27, 1912, 1; James, A Fierce Hatred of Injustice, 85; Shaw,“Some Impressions,” 13. Olivier to H. G.Wells, May 29, 1937, Sydney Olivier, 174. Olivier, “Moral,” in Fabian Essays, 127–128. In a September 1918 autobiographical sketch, “A Negro Poet,” that appeared in Pearson’s magazine, McKay elaborated: “I felt and still feel that one must seek for the noblest and best in the individual life only: each soul must save itself ” (275–276). Margaret Olivier in Sydney Olivier, 60. Shaw,“Some Impressions,” 14. Shaw characterized Olivier and Webb as “Comtists at secondhand through John Stuart Mill,” and he too admired Henry George (9). George, Progress and Poverty, 12, 126. Preface to a 1931 edition of Fabian Essays. The number of editions and translations of this work attests to its enduring nature and adaptability. Each edition, however, was updated by members, and revisions ceased when there were no longer volunteers— or a need to revise their manifesto. Besant and Beatrice Webb, another Fabian, became critics of the workplace, since poor women and children were its major source of recruits. A younger generation, which included Sylvia Pankhurst and Crystal Eastman, would continue that effort, overlapping feminist and “industrial” concerns. In 1916, Eastman undertook the Pittsburgh Survey, a major study of the conditions of labor in the United States. It included Eastman’s Work Accidents and the Law and a volume by Elizabeth Beardsley Butler, Women and the Trades, Pittsburgh, 1907–08, and led to the passage a few years later of legislation that provided insurance and benefits for on-the-job injuries. Olivier, in Fabian Essays, 9. McKay, “International Soul,” in “New Poems,” Johnson Collection. A significant change in the title was made when the poem appeared in the Crisis (“The Poet’s Corner,” June 1928, 196):“Soul” was changed to “Spirit.” In addition, the last stanza was rewritten.The Crisis version ends: “The nations will be stricken at thy word, / And grand old prejudices crumble down, / That ancient pride in warring breasts has stirred. / The noblest men shall work for any renown. / Thy truest heralds do not fear the frown / Of legioned bigots leaguered by fear and spurred / To crush thy truth, but more the shouting clown, / The standard-flocking of the sheeplike herd.” Olivier to Wells, January 16, 1940, Sydney Olivier, 179. Olivier, Fabianism and the Empire, 39, 15. Frederick Douglass’s comments on the modern wage system appear in Douglass, The Reason Why.The war instigated a debate about the decline of empire.The difficulties in raising “sufficiently healthy recruits,” remark Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst in “Reading the ‘Fin de Siècle’ ” (xvi), “intensified the fantasies of racial decline and degeneration.” The paradox is

160

58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

Notes to Pages 37–41

that while the West became increasingly fascinated with Africa, the imperial drive, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was driven by fear and anxiety. Even militants like W.E.B. Du Bois avoided discussing the implications of the war until many years later. Instead, the Crisis urged readers to “close ranks.” The year 1918, the magazine announced, would be seen as a “great Day of Decision” that would “inaugurate the United States of the World” (“Close Ranks,” Crisis 16 [July 1918]: 111). In contrast, McKay took an antimilitarist stance throughout his life, framed in part by Olivier’s efforts in Jamaica.This stance is conveyed in such poems as “International Soul” but also is found in his novel Home to Harlem, whose protagonist is an army deserter. The novel was condemned by Du Bois, but for other reasons. Many of McKay’s acquaintances were pacifists, such as Crystal Eastman, C. K. Ogden, Sylvia Pankhurst, John Dewey, and Walter Fuller, and they in turn promoted McKay’s work for the message it conveyed.To them, he was more than just a voguish “New Negro,” but a part of a larger international alignment. McKay, A Long Way from Home, 63.The inevitability of society’s self-destruction, finally, had a shattering effect on the Fabians, who believed that “a wholesale war of slaughter and carnage between the civilized nations was impossible; that the world was passing gradually from the cutthroat competitive to a co-operative stage.” As McKay noted of that optimism: “I myself, under the influence of the international idealistic thought of that period, used to think that way” (A Long Way from Home, 63).After Olivier’s departure as governor, conscription was implemented in Jamaica and England, and West Indian units fought in France, Egypt, and Arabia. Olivier, Sydney Olivier, 23. Olivier,“Not Much,” in ibid., 38. According to Olivier, two-thirds of the colony was under lease to the British Honduras Company, and land titles were often traded, he was shocked to discover,“for a bottle of rum” (ibid., 39). Although “Hard Times” is considered the first poem published by McKay, when he lived in England later, he wrote to Ogden that he began writing in “the Jamaican dialect” in 1905, two years before his training with Walter Jekyll (McKay to Ogden, March 12, 1920, Ogden Papers). Historically, sugar planters formed an influential and wealthy class in Jamaica; few resided on the island, even though they held positions in government and were assembly representatives. Olivier, especially as a representative of the Sugar Commission, was seen as an intruder (Hurwitz and Hurwitz, Jamaica, 61). In the term’s reappropriation by McKay, naygur conveys the political and social endurance to survive and defines the much-admired simplicity of Olivier’s “natural man.” In the poem “Hard Times,” McKay uses “black nagyur” as a way of characterizing the backwardness associated with a certain way of thinking. One assumes, then, in the way McKay uses the term here, that it is less a racial description. See James, A Fierce Hatred of Injustice, 4–10; Olivier, Jamaica, 377–379. James, A Fierce Hatred of Injustice, 6. Olivier considered banana cultivation important for the political integrity of the island, as a place of small peasant-run farms. To Nancy Cunard’s question, “Who gets the profit on the banana? Never the Jamaican peasant!” Olivier replied: “This is just what he does do if he is one of 15,000 who belong to the Banana Co-operative” (Olivier, “Miss Cunard and the Negro,” 352). Olivier challenged many assertions by Nancy Cunard, who wrote on Jamaica in The Negro Anthology, which appeared in 1934.The peasants were far from exploited, he explained, and he gave as an example of a self-help organization, the Banana Cooperative, which “markets one-third of the island’s crop, owns its own ships, sells its own fruit in Europe and distributes the profit on every bunch” (ibid.). Olivier, Sydney Olivier, 90. Sydney Olivier to Margaret Olivier, February 6, 1891, Sydney Olivier, 88.

Notes to Pages 41–45

161

71. Adrienne Munich describes this Victorian craze for plant collecting as having “an imperialist cast.”The story of missions, she writes, “to sight, propagate, and name a fabulous water lily growing in the depths of the Amazon rain forest assumes allegorical outlines, a wondrous yet true story characterizing both the age and its monarch” (Victoria’s Secrets, 212). 72. Margaret Olivier in Sydney Olivier, 60, 94. 73. Herbert G. de Lisser, “Notes on Lord Olivier’s Official Career in Jamaica,” in Sydney Olivier, 231. 74. In 1934, Olivier still praised the work he inaugurated in Jamaica, particularly his programs that had to do with land reform. He noted that in 1930 there were 213,395 freeholders out of a population of one million, with 184,444 having agricultural holdings.“Wages are low, and casual labourers are, no doubt, very poor; but Jamaica is a free and happy country for the vast majority of her agricultural workers,” he pointed out (Olivier,“Miss Cunard and the Negro,” 350–352). 75. In 1865, a group of peasants led by Paul Bogle, a landowner, marched forty-five miles from their homes in Stony Gut to King’s House in Spanish Town. They had grievances over land rights. Eyre refused to meet them in Spanish Town, realizing it would take an entire day to travel down and then up the mountainside by horseback. Instead, when couriers brought news on October 11 of the rebellion, he declared martial law, leveled nearly a thousand homes, and executed 354 uprisers, including George William Gordon, a respected abolitionist and assemblyman in Kingston. Gordon, an educated mulatto, and Bogle, a peasant landowner, were hanged from the yardarm of the H.M.S. Wolverine, an English battleship that had been summoned to Jamaica. 76. Olivier to Henry Salt, September 21, 1933, Sydney Olivier, 170.Thomas Carlyle and Lord Cardigan, who is blamed for the loss of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in the Crimea, were Eyre’s chief supporters in England. “Any cruelty is justified when dealing with the coloured races,” Cardigan remarked.At Eyre’s insistence, the British government abolished the two-hundred-year-old independent assembly, which represented Jamaican autonomy over its domestic affairs. The island reverted to complete Crown rule (Hurwitz and Hurwitz, Jamaica, 145–148). 77. The reputation of such humanitarian groups for saving the natives eroded after the appearance of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in 1902 and his linking of missionary zeal to genocide. 78. The Survey Graphic would later describe this “ethic awakening” in terms of a “race revival” in such features as “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” which appeared in March 1925. Kathryne Lindberg discovered the poem “George William Gordon to the Oppressed Natives” in T.P.’s Weekly for April 12, 1912. It was not included in McKay’s two volumes of Jamaican verse, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, published that year, nor did it appear in his selected poems, published in 1953 (see Lindberg,“Rebels to the Right,” 33, 54). 79. Sydney to Margaret Olivier, September 19, 1900, Sydney Olivier, 110. 80. Ibid., 113. 81. Ibid., 6. McKay in 1918 also befriended Harris, who published his poems in Pearson’s and encouraged him to write more political poems, as well as fiction. 82. De Lisser, in Sydney Olivier, 230. 83. W. Cooper, Claude McKay, 29. 84. Olivier, September 19, 1900, Sydney Olivier, 110. 85. McKay to Ogden, March 26, 1920, Ogden Papers; Gleaner, October 7, 1911, 7. 86. De Lisser, in Sydney Olivier, 233. Olivier’s attitude was part of the English way of dealing with colonials. For instance, the writer of a June 1865 letter to Queen Victoria that complained of a lack of goods and services told Jamaican peasants to “look

162

87. 88. 89.

90. 91.

Notes to Pages 45–49

for improvement in their own condition” by prudence and industry (Hurwitz and Hurwitz, Jamaica, 146). McKay to Ogden, March 26, 1920, Ogden Papers. According to Winston James, Olivier did take a cut in salary when he was appointed to the Agricultural Board in England (A Fierce Hatred of Injustice, 87). Shaw,“Some Impressions,” 18. McKay to Ogden, March 26, 1920, Ogden Papers.Years later, when McKay visited him in London in 1920, Olivier was still grieving, especially because he thought he had won the hearts of all Jamaicans, even McKay, its prodigious son of the soil. Although poet and former governor exchanged pleasantries and talked about the “old times,” there was still an icy silence even after the poet later left an inscribed copy of Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems, his English lyrics (McKay to Ogden, May 18, 1920, Ogden Papers). Shaw,“Some Impressions,” 18. Olivier, “Hostile Spirit,” Gleaner, January 25, 1913, 9; “Jamaica Bids Farewell Today to Its Energetic and Successful Governor, As Well As to Lady Olivier,” Gleaner, January 18, 1913, 1.

Chapte r 3

1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

For the Love of “de Re d Seam”

The chapter epigraph is from Walter Jekyll, “Old Memories of Home Land,” Gleaner, December 14, 1912. Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 67. Jekyll,“A Day in a Jamaica Garden,” Garden, March 1, 1902, 137. As a consequence of those articles in the Garden, Walter Jekyll was given a commission to write the Guide to Hope Garden, a garden outside Kingston that was a horticultural marvel. McKay, who appreciated its beauty, conceivably was inspired to name his daughter, Hope, in its honor. The trajectory of this empire, according to Cannadine in Ornamentalism, begins around 1850 and ends before World War II, in 1935. The highpoint was Victoria’s Silver Jubilee of 1897. The result, writes Cannadine, was one vast interconnected world in which the imperial was expressed, increasingly, as the ornamental. Thus empire “was about antiquity and anachronism, tradition and honour, order and subordination; about glory and chivalry, horses and elephants, knights and peers, processions and ceremonies, plumed hats and ermine robes; about chiefs and emirs, sultans and nawabs, viceroys and pro-consuls; about thrones and crowns, dominion and hierarchy, ostentation and ornamentalism” (126). Some of those images, particularly the poetic ones, found an accommodating place in McKay’s verse. Jekyll, preface to Jamaican Song and Story. Jekyll collected and edited all the material in this book, which included an introduction by Alice Werner; “Traces of African Melody in Jamaica,” by C. S. Myers; and “English Airs and Motifs in Jamaica,” by Lucy E. Broadwood. It was reprinted in 1966 by Dover, with introductory essays by Philip Sherlock, Louise Bennett, and Rex Nettleford. Agnes Jekyll, Ne Oublie (privately printed), xi; qtd. in Tankard and Van Valkenburgh, Gertrude Jekyll, 212. Walter Jekyll is buried at Lucea Parish Church in Jamaica. Unlike his fictional counterpart, the effete Squire Gensir in McKay’s Banana Bottom, who symbolized the embattled English gentry, Jekyll had no desire to return to England. Herbert Jekyll obituary, Times of London, September 30, 1932. In 1850 the British Colonial Office purchased Danish interests in the region and gave some protection to the coastal Fanti Confederation, while the inland areas were dominated by the Ashanti. Britain occupied the capital, Kumasi.After a series of conflicts with the Ashanti in 1824 and 1874, the colony of Gold Coast was established.

Notes to Pages 49–55

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

163

Further wars against the Ashanti followed in 1896 and 1900. In 1920, colonists demanded home rule. In 1957, Gold Coast and British Togoland to the east were combined to become the independent Republic of Ghana, under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah—the first British African colony to be granted independence. Herbert Jekyll also did a little interior design work on the side and assembled the British pavilion at the Paris Exhibition with the help of Edwin Lutyens, Gertrude Jekyll’s associate. Herbert retired from the government in 1911 at the age of sixtyfive; he was eighty when he died. Agnes Jekyll, Kitchen Essays, vii–viii. Agnes Jekyll’s gardening columns for the Times of London were collected in this book. Herbert Jekyll, qtd. in Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 82. Jean Toomer, Cane (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923). “The Biter Bit” is part of a larger trajectory of black expression—what Houston Baker Jr. calls an “unsettling blackness”—where the sharp lines that separate modernism, progressivism, avant-gardism, montage, hybridity, anxiety of influence, and continental theory dissolve and reemerge in a cultural mix that allows for recuperation and expression in the colonials. Baker was referring specifically to African American writers and their place in the canon, but such an unsettling might apply to McKay’s work as well (see Baker “Preface,” 247). McKay to Ogden, March 26, 1920, Ogden Papers. Reminiscences of Lady Duff Gordon and Walter’s older sister Caroline, qtd. in Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 54, 55. Quoted in Massingham, Miss Jekyll, 42. Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 71–72. Soon after their momentous vacation with Brabazon, Gertrude and Walter Jekyll parted ways. She traveled to Algeria, where she studied African and Islamic designs; Walter left for Malta, with a detour to Milan to study voice with Francesco Lamperti (a later project involved translating his The Art of Singing According to Ancient Tradition). Herbert Jekyll stayed put in West Africa, where England continued to be deeply embroiled in war. W. Jekyll, The Bible Untrustworthy, 283. Jekyll, Jamaican Song, qtd. in North, The Dialect of Modernism, 107–108. Annancy, the Jamaican word for “spider,” derives from “Twi [West African] Ananse.” An annancy rope is a spider’s web, and “Annancy stories” feature the spider as the chief character. Annancy characters are descended from people of Ghana. Among the old characters are Annancy; his wife, Crooky; his son, Tacooma; and Asunu the elephant. Annancy, the central figure of the stories, is sometimes a man but more often a spider with human qualities and characteristics. North, The Dialect of Modernism, 102. Ibid., 102. McKay to Ogden, March 26, 1920, Ogden Papers. North, The Dialect of Modernism, 107–108. Ibid. Ibid. McKay to Ogden, March 26, 1920, Ogden Papers. McKay, My Green Hills of Jamaica, 66–67. McKay to Ogden, March 26, 1920, Ogden Papers. The publisher was Aston W. Gardner, which in 1911 published Walter Jekyll’s Guide to Hope Garden, a book that established Hope as a major source of horticultural information for commonwealth readers around the world. Walter Jekyll was convinced that Songs of Jamaica would be just as important, and it was published in 1912 with a Kingston and London imprint.

164

Notes to Pages 56–61

32. Cobham,“Jekyll and Claude,” 127. Olivier shared with Walter Jekyll a deep admiration for McKay’s synthetic abilities, and the two men vied for the poet’s attention. While there was a clear sexual tension in the relationships, much of their interest was aesthetic and philosophical, I believe. 33. Tooley and Arnander, Gertrude Jekyll, 42. 34. McKay, A Long Way from Home, 13. 35. Marwick, Christian Commonwealth, December 11, 1911, qtd. in “Another Appreciation from a London Paper,” Gleaner, January 16, 1912, 13. In the 1970s, critic Michael Stoff interpreted Songs of Jamaica not simply as a work of dialect but as a finely crafted persona that projected an authentic “Jamaican folk culture,” which captures “the exotic and early qualities of the black peasantry with a lyrical sensitivity reminiscent of Robert Burns” (see Stoff, Harlem Renaissance Remembered [New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972], 127). 36. This appeal to “higher criticism” gets cultivated later in the colonies as “liberation theology.” Dorothy Day, one of its chief practitioners in the United States, fashioned this colonial orientation through her efforts at the Catholic Worker. Day was closely acquainted with McKay, particularly in the latter part of his life, and published his poems. She had been a contributor to the Masses as well.The Catholic Worker still operates a shelter, pantry, and outreach on New York City’s Lower East Side. 37. “Someday I would write poetry in straight English and amaze and confound them,” McKay wrote in My Green Hills of Jamaica, 86–87. 38. W. Cooper, Claude McKay, 27; McKay, My Green Hills of Jamaica, 66.There is some debate on what constituted “the real thing.” Michael North, for instance, in The Dialect of Modernism, interprets the “real thing” to mean a poem written in authentic dialect.That might not have been the meaning in Walter Jekyll’s statement.The “real thing” might have had little to do with literary forms of excellence. McKay later explained that Jekyll encouraged him to write “in any rhythm that came naturally to me” and did not emphasize one poetic form—or standard of excellence. The real thing, then, was an enigma (McKay to Ogden, March 26, 1920, Ogden Papers). 39. McKay to Ogden, March 12, 1920, Ogden Papers. 40. McKay, My Green Hills of Jamaica, 67; McKay to Ogden, March 12, 1920, Ogden Papers. 41. McKay, A Long Way from Home, 12. 42. McKay, interview with W.A. Stevenson, Gleaner, October 7, 1911, 6. In a March 12, 1920, letter to C. K. Ogden (Ogden Papers), McKay explained that he began writing poetry in 1905, when he was fifteen, a difference of two years.This might have been a bit of a boast to impress his London editor. In the same letter he gave an earlier publication date for Songs of Jamaica. 43. “Ways o’ the Peasant” appeared in the Gleaner, January 27, 1912, 18. 44. Walter Jekyll’s mountain-top home was severely damaged in a 1907 earthquake, and he reportedly gave the property to his gardener upon moving to Kingston.To make a living (he had been harvesting and selling coffee and other crops), he gave private lessons in music, French, Latin, Greek history, geography, and arithmetic (Tooley and Arnander, Gertrude Jekyll, 41). 45. McKay believed that every cultured Englishman should have an understanding of nature and gardening.When he traveled to London in 1920, he was astonished that Ogden, a Cambridge bibliophile and intellectual, did not grasp some of his horticultural terms. 46. Glissant terms this evolution the Afro-Caribbean’s “irruption into modernity” in sketching his “poetics of location” (Caribbean Discourse, qtd. in Hitchcock, “Antillanité and the Art of Resistance,” 34). Peter Hitchcock expands on this “cartography of resistance,” wherein “memory has been experienced as a rupture,” as a dislocation that enables the island “aurality,” as Hitchcock describes it, to dominate as a central

Notes to Pages 61–68

47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66.

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aesthetic trope in which “spatial thought remains endemic to what the writer is or must become.”The mastery—and irony—in McKay’s work is his ability to express both location and dislocation using horticulture (see Hitchcock, ibid., 34–35). W. Jekyll,“In the Port Royal Mountains, Jamaica,” Garden, March 30, 1901. Ibid. Jamaica Kincaid, “Alien Soil,” New Yorker, June 21, 1993, 48; also see Kincaid, My Garden (Book) (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999). Adrienne Munich describes an aspect of this power, what she calls “the Victoria legend,” which was used successfully to “colonize the vegetable world”: Botanists searched the world for the most magnificent specimens, which were then catalogued and given pretentious royal names, totally cut off from their origins (Victoria’s Secrets, 212). I build on my earlier definitions of diaspora, put forth by Hall, Edwards, Butler, and others, as a way of revitalizing an idealization of a human community. But one can also see this diaspora in terms of a general longing for ecological balance and adaptability among all species, plant and animal, in migration from one region to another. Kincaid,“Alien Soil,” 47. Another poem that evokes the same connections is “The Easter Flower”:“Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly / My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground / Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter Lily, . . . Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.” North, The Dialect of Modernism, 112. Others, such as Kathryne Lindberg, have positioned McKay at the center of empire—or at least entangled in the concerns of such antagonistic movements as Fabianism and international feminism (see “Rebels to the Right”). North, The Dialect of Modernism, 112. W. Jekyll, preface to McKay, Songs of Jamaica (1912), 9. MacDermot, Jamaica Times, August 10, 1912. W. Jekyll, “In the Port Royal Mountains, Jamaica,” Garden, March 30, 1901, 223. W. Jekyll,“Old Memories of Home Land,” Gleaner, December 14, 1912. This seemed to be a quirk of the English, who made their cottages into remote castles or idyllic hermitages on hilltops, inaccessible not only to the fainthearted and timid, but also to modern contraptions. W. Jekyll,“A Jamaica Garden,” Garden, August 18, 1900, 125. W. Cooper, Claude McKay, 32.Walter Jekyll mentioned in one of his journals that he was able to live off the earnings from coffee cultivation, and the region is still noted for excellent coffee beans, cultivated by independent landowners (“Gardens of Jamaica,” Garden, January 31, 1903, 77). Information on McKay’s childhood background can be found in James, A Fierce Hatred of Injustice. James’s focus on the family business is an attempt to dispel any illusions that McKay was a poor peasant, an image the poet might have encouraged for political reasons.W. Cooper’s Claude McKay attempts to analyze McKay’s intellectualism as arising out of a close relationship with his mother. McKay interview, 6. McKay to Cunard, March 27, 1932, Cunard Collection. As Cannadine notes, sometimes empire turned a blind eye to its colonial cousins, as with Sydney Olivier’s radical experiments in Jamaica. Among the colonies, there was an increasing sense of shared Britishness.“From one perspective,” explains Cannadine, “the British may indeed have seen the peoples of their empire as alien, as other, as beneath them—to be lorded over and condescended to. But from another, they also saw them as similar, as analogous, as equal and sometimes even as better than they were themselves” (Ornamentalism, 123; italics in the original).

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Notes to Pages 68–73

67. Those poems might have been McKay’s way to persuade the authorities that poetry and policing were incompatible. In all, however, he viewed his attempt as a failure: “I didn’t want to publish them, but Mr. Jekyll urged me to. I consented as he was paying for the production” (McKay to Ogden, May 12, 1920, Ogden Papers). 68. McKay, A Long Way from Home, 16. 69. Gleaner, October 7, 1911. 70. McKay to Cunard, April 30, 1932, Cunard Collection. McKay continued to use the military garb of empire as a way of promoting his poetry.A photo of the poet dressed as a Kingston policeman, used on the frontispiece of Songs of Jamaica, was reprinted throughout the colonies. His training as a colonial policeman enabled McKay to delineate a type of character that had become commonplace after World War I—the preeminent American,“the highest composite type of the United States civilization.” This characterization echoes Olivier in his description of Eyre. This type, McKay writes, is a “strong, sentimental ape-man who refuses to use his intellect under any circumstances and touches everything that is fine in civilized life, friendship, sex, duty, with the hand of the brute” (McKay, “The American Type,” Liberator, January 1922). 71. McKay,“To Bennie (In Answer to a Letter),” Songs of Jamaica, 129. 72. Holcomb,“Diaspora Cruises,” 720. 73. Olivier,“White Man’s Burden at Home,” 6. 74. In the poem “In the Heart of a Constab,” McKay writes:“Oh! Where are de faces I loved in de past, / De frien’s dat I used to hold dear? / Oh say, have dey all turned away from me now / Becausen de red seam I wear?” 75. McKay, preface to Constab Ballads, 7–8.

Chapte r 4

A Garde n for All Reasons

The chapter epigraph is from Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 259, quoting Gertrude Jekyll. 1. G. Jekyll, Old West Surrey, 218. Both Old West Surrey and Jamaican Song and Story were commissioned by the London Folk-Lore Society. 2. Frank, Our America (1919), 225. In the chapter “The Turning of the Soil,” Frank saw the same collision in terms of militarism: “America was full of beauty and strength which marching America had trampled. The material march went on. . . . It had cleared the continent. It had become the impulse of the modern World” (ibid.). A similar view was expressed in the visual arts and cinema. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis provided a dazzling tableau of the repetitive work that inspired nothing but revolt, and many modern artists consciously—and unconsciously—mimicked this mechanical monotony. 3. G. Jekyll, Old West Surrey, viii. 4. Marvis Batey, “Gertrude Jekyll and the Arts and Crafts Movement,” in Tooley and Arnander, Gertrude Jekyll, 19. 5. The movement was formally introduced at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in 1888, the first showing of decorative arts in England. Many craftspeople, particularly gardeners, had been working along similar lines long before, however. In 1861,William Morris, with partners Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Maddox Brown, Philip Webb, and Edward Burne-Jones, began assembling crafted items. In 1897, Gustav Stickley started his firm in the United States, and in 1901 he published Craftsman Magazine, an important resource on natural landscaping. Proponents of the movement worked at an integrative expression of the locale through harmony, color, and texture (see ibid., 17). 6. G. Jekyll, Old West Surrey, viii (my italics). 7. As with Fabianism and the folkloric, the Arts and Crafts aesthetic, which Jekyll helped redefine with the garden as centerpiece, had a profound influence on McKay, passed on through Walter’s contacts with his sister.

Notes to Pages 74–81

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8. G. Jekyll, Old West Surrey, 247. 9. W. Jekyll, Jamaican Song and Story, which seemed like a preface to the more fullbodied Songs of Jamaica, McKay’s first book of verse. 10. Deborah Nevins, introduction, xiv. 11. Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 221. 12. The Jekylls’ mistrust of this mechanical culture is in contrast to the view of Ezra Pound and others who were disgusted with “the melancholy young men, the aesthetic young men, the romantic young men, past types; fabians, past; simple lifers, past.The present: a generation which ceases to flatter.” Pound, who contributed to the Blast, wrote that “all experiences rush into the vortex,” which he characterized as the turbine of industry and repetitive work. This vortex, Pound noted, is the mechanics of maximum efficiency (Pound, “Chronicles,” “Vortex.Pound,” Blast, July 1915, Modern American Poetry, www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/ pound.htm). 13. Nevins, introduction, xxvii, xxiii. 14. McIntosh was also the author of a two-volume encyclopedia, The Book of the Garden. He is quoted in Deborah Nevins’s 1984 introduction to The English Flower Garden (1883). Nevins points out: “Bedding-out could never have been a success without the importation of hundreds of tropical and sub-tropical plants to northern Europe in the nineteenth century” (xv). 15. Robinson, The English Flower Garden (1883), 100. 16. Jekyll, qtd. in Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 93. 17. Robinson, The English Flower Garden (1984), xviii. 18. McKay was surprised at his warm reception among London’s “garden set.” Pamela McKenna, Agnes Jekyll’s daughter, for instance, helped circulate copies of Songs of Jamaica throughout England through her network of garden contacts.When McKay went off to attend college in 1911, Agnes sent him underwear for the chilly winter nights in Kansas. Apparently, this was a tradition among the Jekylls when an offspring went off into the world (McKay to Ogden, March 26, 1920, Ogden Papers). 19. Wilson qtd. in Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 92. 20. Olivier, White Capital, 127. Olivier’s idea of horticulture differed from other gardeners’, such as Gertrude Jekyll, due to his involvement in the colonies, particularly with large-scale agribusiness. Although he was fond of daffodils and crocuses, Olivier’s aesthetics were those of a formal land manager for the Colonial Office, concerned with community and agricultural sustainability. He wanted his vegetables— no flowers—to be obediently straight:“for rows of vegetables which were not quite even and parallel would always be a torment to him” (Sydney Olivier, 158–159). 21. Watson qtd. in Nevins, introduction, xx. 22. Ibid. By 1890, writes Deborah Nevins, these artist-gardeners such as Gertrude Jekyll began to refer to themselves as practitioners of an Arts and Crafts aesthetic that revered the peasant and craftsperson (introduction, xix). 23. Still, a particular type of Englishness prevailed. Jamaica Kincaid has remarked in “Alien Soil” how the English garden was like a painting: “tamed, framed, captured, kind, decent, good, pretty.” She notes the influence of this aesthetic, where “outside space was devoted not to feeding their families but to the sheer beauty of things.” Gertrude Jekyll would argue with this aesthetic as well. 24. G. Jekyll, Old Surrey, 218. Likewise, Jamaican Song and Story was Walter Jekyll’s “tribute to my love for Jamaica and its dusky inhabitants, with their winning ways and their many good qualities, among which is to be reckoned that supreme virtue, Cheerfulness” (in “Author’s Preface”). Cheerfulness was a quality appreciated by both Gertrude and Walter. 25. Olivier integrated the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill and William Morris and his Arts and Crafts aesthetic into the day-to-day fabric of Jamaica. He saw the hillsides

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26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

Notes to Pages 81–89

as a cauldron of creativity, and all facets of its society, he believed, including the constabulary, should have an “authentic, original vital activity,” achieved through “the hand, the voice, the ear.” Only then can a genuine “expression of nature through the temperament of the producer” be achieved (Olivier, “William Morris,” Spectator, March 23, 1934; qtd. in Sydney Olivier, 74, 76). G. Jekyll qtd. in Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 88. Diaspora continues to be seen by scholars as “the interconnecting ideology that completes the wheel, linking the spokes to each as well as to the center, thus creating the whole of this transnational community.” It is also an interstitial space between parallel diasporas, such as India, Asia, and Africa, and more complicated diasporas, as in the case of McKay’s “cartography,” oriented to Africa, aesthetically linked to the Caribbean, but bound by tradition and reception to Europe. McKay’s identity, then, as Kim Butler writes, is “a vital component of diasporas; it transforms them from the physical reality of dispersal into the psychosocial reality of diaspora” (Butler,“Defining Diaspora,” 207, 208). Later, McKay fine-tuned his lyrics to “new symbolic melodies,” which C. K. Ogden conceived as a language of diaspora against the uniformity of modernism (Ogden, Tales Told of Shem and Shaun, xiv). Hall,“Thinking the Diaspora,” 8. “My Native Land, My Home,” in The Dialect Poetry of Claude McKay, 84–85; Olivier to Sidney Webb, November 21, 1890, and Olivier to H. G.Wells, May 29, 1905, Sydney Olivier, 85, 127. G. Jekyll qtd. in Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 97. N. Jonsson-Rose, Lawns and Gardens, qtd. in Nevins, introduction, xix. Greenhouses are still integral to English gardening, although they have come a long way from their cathedral-like appearance in the mid–nineteenth century.They are more likely to be constructed of cedar and integrated into domestic life as an extension of the home. An example of the type of greenhouse popular in the mid– and late nineteenth century is the New York Botanical Garden, which towers over the landscape as a preserve. Nevins, introduction, xix. Ibid., xvii–xviii. Robinson qtd. in ibid., xv. Greenhouses became affordable in England after a tax on glass was repealed in the late 1840s, lowering the costs of construction and making them appealing to the middle class. See ibid., xv, xix. Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 66. “A Garden City,” Garden, January 6, 1900, 1. G. Jekyll, Garden 22, qtd. in Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 98. Ibid.,“To Our Readers,” Garden, January 6, 1900, 1. F.W. Burbidge,“Gordon’s Garden at Khartum,” Garden, May 12, 1900, 349. In 1881, Gertrude Jekyll described some of the exotic plants she received from a botanist at the University of Algiers, M. Durango, such as the Cyclamen africanum tuber “measuring 24 1/4 in. and weighting 3 lb. 5 oz.,” and the Scilla maritima,“22 1/2 inches, weighing 5 lb. 13 oz. with its leaves” (qtd. in Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 91, 99. McKay, “How Black Sees Green and Red,” Liberator, June 1921, qtd. in W. Cooper, Claude McKay, 59. Gleaner, March 20, 1912, 14. Review of “Songs of Jamaica,” Gleaner, January 13, 1912, 17, qtd. in Garden February 19, 1912, 10. Jamaica went from a representative free society to a Crown possession in 1865 after the Morant Bay rebellion. During Olivier’s term as governor, he made selfsufficiency for small family farms an issue. This history is embedded and threaded throughout the poem’s romantic meaning.

Notes to Pages 89–95

169

45. Walter Jekyll explains in a note to “De Dog-Rose,” which appeared in Songs of Jamaica, that a coney is a rabbit not native to the Caribbean, and McKay might use it as a reference to the island’s cultural affection for England or Scotland. The coney also provides an aesthetic dimension to McKay’s cartography, his entryway to this “other” Englishness, which follows imagined routes of migration much as the coney conjures flights of fancy. 46. McKay explained that the “widely accepted English language does not prevent the Negro, to any real extent, from expressing his feelings as the same language would prevent him in England.” Caste was an “irreconcilability with respect to the formal purity of the language” and “is a very distinctive feature of contemporary English literature.” McKay developed an ear for an alternative language that surpassed dialect and even aristocratic English (McKay, The Negroes in America, 75). 47. McKay remarked sadly:“In England the land issue was raised only by the liberal radicals, and finds no response in the hearts of the proletariat.” McKay believed that it was essential to work toward liberating “millions of city folk to go back to the land” (“How Black Sees Green and Red,” 20–21, qtd. in W. Cooper, Claude McKay, 61). 48. “John Ruskin: An Appreciation,” Garden, February 3, 1900. 49. “Like a Strong Tree,” in “New Poems” (Johnson Collection), was written in the mid-1920s. It is McKay’s tribute to the power of nature as a revolutionary and unifying force. 50. Riding, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 167–169. 51. McKay to Cunard, September 29, 1932, Cunard Collection. 52. Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 56. Festing implies that Gertrude Jekyll might have been supportive of the Arts and Crafts Movement had there been a “more feminist climate” (96). 53. A fine example of this idealization can be found in William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1891), a socialistic novel about an egalitarian utopia based on “workpleasure.” Women are portrayed as pliant and nurturing—qualities most males encouraged. See Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1918) for a contrary view of this female type. 54. Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 89. 55. Ibid. Francis Jekyll, Gertrude’s nephew, published Gertrude Jekyll:A Memoir in 1934, with a foreword by Edwin Lutyens and an introduction by Agnes Jekyll. 56. McKay eventually settled in Algiers as well, and I wonder if Gertrude Jekyll’s remarks on the vibrancy of the landscape and culture had been conveyed to him, somehow, through her brother Walter. 57. Gertrude Jekyll, A Gardener’s Testament: A Selection of Articles and Notes, ed. Francis Jekyll and G. C.Taylor (New York: Scribner’s, 1937), 5. (The book was published in London by Country Life in the same year.) 58. Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 63.The question of who ultimately shapes a garden was crucial for Jekyll, and it was from this vantage that one sees the lay of the land. For instance, Marvis Batey asks in “Gertrude Jekyll and the Arts and Crafts Movement”: “Should the garden be designed by the gardener who had nothing to do with the house, or the architect, who was unlikely to know anything about planting?” It was the architect who, in the Victorian period, ruled over the garden by tyrannically “echoing architectural themes.” William Robinson, among others, was repulsed by this “barbarous, needless and inartistic” attempt at shaping a garden aesthetic. But it was Gertrude Jekyll, Batey points out, in collaboration with Edwin Lutyens, who gave “the new century a new style which would reconcile architects, gardeners, craftsmen and the rival merits of formal design and natural gardening” (17). 59. Sir Herbert Baker, qtd. in Tooley and Arnander, Gertrude Jekyll, 17. 60. G. Jekyll, Gertrude Jekyll, 62. 61. “John Ruskin,” 1.

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Notes to Pages 95–100

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

Nevins, introduction, xvii, xix. G. Jekyll, Gertrude Jekyll, 27. See Nevins, introduction, xvii. Festing, Gertrude Jekyll, 52. William Morris, qtd. in Batey,“Gertrude Jekyll,” 19. This peacefulness is undercut by the thought of Willie turning out to be a phantom—embodying Walter Jekyll, McKay’s mentor, or possibly Bennie, a fellow cadet with whom McKay had an affair—who might come back to haunt him. 67. McKay described his position in society in just those terms—as a rare flower among weeds (McKay to Ogden, 1922, Ogden Papers). Gertrude Jekyll’s biographers, Judith Tankard and R.Van Valkenburgh, attribute the elimination of such “rare flowers” as reflecting post–World War I modernist biases, in which flowers were no longer seen as central to garden design. Tankard and Van Valkenburgh appreciate Jekyll’s work and focus as the antitheses of modernism (Gertrude Jekyll, 23). 68. A fascinating footnote to Gertrude Jekyll’s life is the elimination of all her criticisms and comments on the war from A Gardener’s Testament: A Selection of Articles and Notes, which was edited by her nephew Francis Jekyll. He felt the comments were out of character and not relevant to her garden philosophy. He also neglected the upkeep of Munstead Wood and the surrounding grounds and discontinued her mail-order business, which had supplied horticulturists and botanic gardens around the world. Gertrude Stein, in Wars I Have Seen, reminds us that the modern age, indeed, begins with the start of World War I.

Chapte r 5

The Voyage In

The chapter epigraph is from Equiano, The Life of Olaudah Equiano, 103. 1. The letter to Ogden from Fuller was dated November 11, 1919. McKay’s letters pertaining to this period are in the Ogden Papers. 2. Fuller published a book of poems in 1904, A Game of Love, and eventually moved to the United States, where he worked as an editor for the World Tomorrow and, later, the Freeman, periodicals that promoted world peace. Fuller and Ogden knew each other as undergraduates at Magdalene College at Cambridge and were now united more by their pacifist convictions than by their poetic tastes. Ogden, for instance, had testified as a conscientious objector in 1916, and his art gallery and bookshop doubled as an ingenious book-salvaging effort against the paper-rationing drives in England. Eastman, also a pacifist, was a key figure in early twentieth-century international feminism. She moved to England in 1922, where she was a contributor to Time and Tide. 3. Fuller to Ogden, November 1919, Ogden Papers. 4. Later, McKay became an editor at the Liberator, but relations there were tense. In October 1921, when Max Eastman traveled to Russia, he bypassed Floyd Dell, another editor, and made Mike Gold and McKay executive editors. Eastman probably thought he was wedding the new proletarian with a New Negro outlook, but it was an unworkable relationship for everyone. Dell and McKay were frustrated with Gold, and McKay resigned a year later in June 1922. In October 1924, with Gold still at the helm, the Liberator merged with the Labor Herald and Soviet Russian Pictorial to become the Workers Monthly (see Hart, Floyd Dell ). 5. McKay to Ogden, March 12, 1920, Ogden Papers. 6. There was something in Ogden’s disposition, remarked I. A. Richards admiringly, “behind his freaks and humours—a central clarifying insistence, a flame of curiosity and impatience, a disdain for the acquiescences of sloth, a trust in mind, which, even as an undergraduate, made him one of the forces of his time” (Richards,“Some Recollections of C. K. Ogden,” 10–11). He was nevertheless eccentric in his tastes and considered a polymath. He dabbled in vitalism and translated H. Deisch’s History

Notes to Pages 100–100

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

171

and Theory of Vitalism (1914), Romain Rollard’s Above the Battle (1916), and The Idols (1915), and Ludwig Wittgenstein. His discussions with Wittgenstein on language appear in Letters to C. K. Ogden with Comments on the English Translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). Ogden considered himself a pacifist in the international feminist tradition, and with Mary Sargent Florence attacked male privileging and its insidious relationship to war, property, and the poverty of women. Florence was a seasoned veteran and had attended the 1907 Hague Women’s Peace Conference.Together they produced a series of articles,“Militarism versus Feminism: An Enquiry and a Policy Demonstrating that Militarism Involves the Subjugation of Women,” published anonymously by Allen and Unwin as Militarism versus Feminism:Writings on Women and War in April 1915, to convince women not to waver in their peace efforts: “In war man alone rules: when war is over man does not surrender his privileges” (56). Literary scholars such as Jane Marcus continue that line, arguing that “all wars destroy women’s culture, returning women to the restricted roles of childbearing and nursing and only that work that helps the war effort.The struggle for women’s own political equity becomes almost treasonous in wartime” (afterword to Helen Zenna Smith, Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War [New York: Feminist Press, 1989], 249). Ogden breathed new life into an old institution, the Cambridge and Oxford Magazine, begun in January 1856 by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, the apostles of the Arts and Crafts movement and English socialism. Building on that tradition, Ogden also borrowed from another radical, Jeremy Bentham, and his views on education, homosexuality, and gender inequity were important topics in the magazine’s editorial perspective. Bentham was the first intellectual to articulate a theory of internationalism. Russo, I. A. Richards, 95. These “dispersal camps,” as Ogden characterized them, acted as subversive “centres of learning both on the Continent and in America and the East” (introduction, Cambridge Magazine 10 [summer 1920], 1). Ibid.;“Ourselves,” Cambridge Magazine 10 (January 20, 1912), 1. Such openness was the cause for later condemnation of the magazine. At the height of World War I, for instance, with the journal’s increasingly bold critiques of the war, Cambridge newspapers questioned why it was allowed to publish through the university.The question prompted a swift reply from faculty and students, and a petition was drafted claiming that it was “in every sense as much a University paper as any other in Oxford or Cambridge.” Simply because the magazine appealed “to a wide circle of readers outside the university does not seem to us to have any bearing on the question of its University character” (“The Cambridge Magazine” petition, undated, Ogden Papers). Ogden, System of Basic English, 11, 17. Both African and U.S. business were on the ascent throughout the world, in terms of appeal and influence. Ogden’s forays into mass communication, colonial poetics, and deemotionalizing language have special resonance today, particularly with regard to the Internet and simplified global English. It is not coincidental that George Orwell, the author of 1984, became a leading proponent of a “deemotionalized” language in the 1930s, a time of authoritarian threats from the Right and Left. “The instrument—global English,” note Christine Holden and David M. Levy, “which Ogden focused his energies on in the attempt to make international communications more transparent is something we observe around us.The many voices lamenting the losses which accompany language death, while understandable for what they mourn, seem not to recognize that Ogden’s work is something with which they must argue. Does not a common language reduce dangers of misunderstanding? And surely an Ogden who lived through World War I and the 30s, and Orwell who had experienced World War II and the consolidation of Soviet power in Eastern Europe, were not alone in wishing to reduce

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12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Notes to Pages 100–102

misunderstandings, both in personal and political terms” (“From Emotionalized Language,” 105). See Hardwick, Semiotic and Significs, xxii. Basic is an acronym for “British, American, Scientific, Industrial, and Commercial.” Ogden believed it was the business of “all internationally-minded persons to make Basic English part of the system of education in every country, so that there may be less chance of war, and less learning of languages—which, after all, for most of us, are a very unnecessary waste of time” (System of Basic English, 10). I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden, “The Linguistic Conscience,” Cambridge Magazine 10 (summer 1920): 39–40 Ibid., 32; Ogden, Debabelization, 13.“It is worth asking what can be done for Internationalism with the 500 words of Panoptic English, or whither a billion symbols will lead the groping scientist,” Ogden remarked (preface to Tales Told of Shem and Shaun, viv–xv). Armstrong, Victorian Poetry. “It is clear that the nature of the experiencing subject, the problems of representation, fiction and language,” writes Armstrong,“are just as much the heart of Victorian problems as they are the preoccupations of modernism. The difference is that the Victorians see them as problems, the modernists do not. Where the Victorians strive to give a content to these problems, political, sexual, epistemological, and to formulate a cultural critique, the moderns celebrate the elimination of content.Victorian problems become abstracted, formalised, and aestheticised. The difference is ideological, as the stuffing of the Victorian sofa disappears and art becomes self-reflexive and self-referential” (ibid., 7). See John Lyons, “Diachrony and Snychrony in Twentieth-Century Lexical Semantics: Old Wine in New Bottles?” (Transactions of the Philological Society 97, 2 [July 1999]: 301) for an understanding of Welby’s importance to the field of semiotics. Ogden and Welby (1837–1912) began corresponding around 1911, the year before she died. In a letter to Charles S. Pierce, she described Ogden as an enthusiastic “recruit” in the new field of significs (Welby to Peirce, May 2, 1911, in Hardwick, Semiotic and Significs, 138–139.) Welby’s first book, Links and Clues, was published in 1881 when she was forty-four. She is also the author of Grains of Sense and What Is Meaning? Studies in the Development of Significance, a philosophical and psychological study on semantics and meaning, both published in 1903. She introduced the work of Michel Breal, Essai de semantique (1897), to English readers in 1900. Her Significs and Language:The Articulate Form of Our Expressive and Interpretive Resources was published in 1911 (rpt. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1985). Hardwick, Semiotic and Significs, xx.This notion is similar to Stuart Hall’s idea of diaspora, which is one of positioning as well (Hall,“Introduction,” 4). Hardwick, Semiotic and Significs, xx. Qtd. in the preface to What Is Meaning, by Victoria Lady Welby (rpt. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1983); originally in Welby, Grains of Sense (1897). Charles S. Peirce, in a review of Welby’s work in the Nation, characterized her as too feminine for intellectuals of the era (see Hardwick, Semiotic and Significs, xvi). Disagreement over the war, along with the increasing mediocrity at Cambridge, motivated Ogden to move to London, where he worked at editing two important scholarly series, the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method, and History of Civilization. Ogden traveled to Cambridge only on weekends to meet with Richards and Wood; he spent the rest of his time in London.After a long Friday-night commute, the three collaborated over the weekend on major works of philosophical and linguistic importance: The Meaning of Psychology (1926), Debabelization, with a Survey of Opinion (1931), and Basic English versus the Artificial Languages. The Meaning of Meaning (1923), their first breakthrough in linguistic meaning, was conceived after a rampage by Cambridge students that left Ogden’s

Notes to Pages 102–104

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

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bookshop and art gallery in shambles. “We stood there two hours on the stairway,” recalled Richards, “till one o’clock. I can remember a bats-wing gas burner above my head.This was out of kilter and every little while it squealed and I would reach up and try to adjust the tap of the burner.We went on and on, and the whole of our book, The Meaning of Meaning, was talked out clearly in two hours” (“Some Recollections of C. K. Ogden,” 11; also see I. A. Richards, Complementarities: Uncollected Essays [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976]). Ogden’s comments on James Joyce appear in his preface to Joyce’s Tales Told of Shem and Shaun:Three Fragments from Work in Progress (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1929). This is the only literary endeavor undertaken by Ogden besides McKay’s Spring in New Hampshire (preface, i, iv). It is interesting that Ogden echoes another nineteenthcentury intellectual, Frederick Douglass, who perceived changes to culture as a result of migration and the commingling of races. J. A. Lauwerys,“Basic English: Its Present Position and Plans,” appendix to Basic English: International Second Language (1968), qtd. in Holden and Levy, “From Emotionalized Language,” 103. Ogden’s comments on McKay’s acquired language appear in the introduction to McKay’s poems in Cambridge Magazine, summer 1920, 55. Again, one is reminded of these diasporas as routes for articulation of art and culture, as intermediaries between dominant societal ideologies (Hall,“Race, Articulation, and Societies,” 41). Ogden, Debabelization, 147, qtd. in Holden and Levy, “From Emotionalized Language,” 81.The quote is a paraphrase of a 1919 Chicago Tribune article. Ibid., 11, 17. McKay also wanted to reconnect with some of the Jekylls and Oliviers, whose company he enjoyed in Jamaica. He especially wanted to thank Agnes, Walter Jekyll’s sister-in-law, and others who helped promote his island verse among the garden set in England. He remembered fondly that “Lady Herbert,” as he referred to her, had sent him warm underwear as protection against the cold of the United States when he went off to college. It was another of those English traditions that shaped his view of the upper classes. He also felt obliged to call on the Oliviers. (Olivier’s daughter Brynhild would be helpful in McKay’s obtaining a coveted British Museum permit.) But McKay admitted to being a little “shy of troubling” Olivier because of the incident in Jamaica in 1912 that involved his poem “De Gubnor’s Salary” (McKay to Ogden, March 26, 1920, Ogden Papers). Ogden, preface, i–ii. Ogden,“Recent Verse,” Cambridge Magazine, January–March 1921, 117. Grosse qtd. in O’Neill, Echoes of Revolt, 133–134. Such a comment, however, was sneered at by Max Eastman and other radicals at the Masses and elsewhere in the United States.“We think it is not language, but Edmund Grosse and all the other library poets who are worn out. . . . The poetry of England is wonderful, a treasure house, but those who live in that house will never add to its riches,” commented Max Eastman, in a January 1913 Masses article,“Knowledge and Revolution,” quite accurately. Ogden,“Recent Verse,” 116–117. Such a close collaboration between a Cambridge-educated intellectual and a Jamaican poet was unheard of in an age when black writers were simply trained in a craft and not considered the artistic equals of whites. The early twentieth century was an age of collaboration, however, for example between Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, which resulted in The Waste Land, and between the poet Laura Riding and her lover, Robert Graves, which produced the provocative A Modernist Survey (1928), a work overlooked today. But those collaborations began with a shared discourse and set of aesthetic assumptions. In contrast, Ogden’s collaborations, carried

174

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36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

Notes to Pages 104–105

on throughout his life with men and women, academics and poets, was his effort at diminishing the authorial control of language that brings with it loaded racial or aesthetic biases. The club, however, was not without its problems. Once, dining with Brynhild and Ogden, an “extreme left fellow” butted into their conversation as McKay was explaining his fears about returning to the United States because he was still a member of the I.W.W. He was questioned about his radical credentials, and crude racial remarks followed.“I could understand anyone intruding at the Socialist Club, but at the 1917!” McKay wrote quite flustered,“it quite beats me.” McKay believed, somewhat naively, that intellectuals at the 1917 were cultured and impartial, much like Ogden himself. He failed to realize that by transgressing into 1917, he ruptured the illusion of equity among these intellectuals. His nonwhite appearance, a rarity, highlighted the whiteness of the club’s interior. McKay shrugged it off, however: “I am always coming up against his type and worse, in America and also here, so I’m used to it. My colour alone makes me so conspicuous; I must reconcile myself to such things. I shouldn’t mind if such encounters were only amusing and tiresome, but at times they are positively dangerous” (McKay to Ogden, March 26, April 2, 1920, Ogden Papers). McKay to Ogden, May 12, 1920, Ogden Papers. In contrast, high modernists, such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, viewed dialect as a way of renewing language, as part of “a program that would demolish the authority of European languages and even of the Roman alphabet.” Dialect would “carry the social and cultural dislocations of the modern period . . . to their logical conclusion in a new language” (see North, The Dialect of Modernism, 99).Whom was one to believe? This deemotionalizing went beyond Harlem and race, as one might expect. For a more thorough discussion of this topic, see Holden and Levy,“From Emotionalized Language.” McKay to Ogden, January 31, 1921, Ogden Papers. Ibid., June 23, 1920, Ogden Papers. Ibid., Saturday, Ogden Papers. “New Hampshire” may have been in circulation in little magazines around the time Ogden was editing McKay’s verse. It appeared as the title poem in New Hampshire in 1923. McKay to Ogden, June 23, 1920, Ogden Papers. Ibid., Saturday, Ogden Papers. Ogden did everything on Spring in New Hampshire from cover design to choice of typography, although McKay offered suggestions throughout the process. Ogden was determined to keep the book as universal as possible—beyond Harlem, the New Negro, and exoticism—even as McKay nervously eyed his eventual return to the States and the New York critics. Ogden’s thinking prevailed, and McKay eventually came around to the book’s merit. Ogden’s influence would be lasting, and when McKay returned to New York, he attempted to interest editors at the Liberator in Ogden’s work. “There is an American audience, however small for your stuff,” McKay explained to Ogden,“the trouble is to get at it” (McKay to Ogden, March 10, 1921, Ogden Papers).When The Foundations of Aesthetics was taking shape in the pages of Cambridge Magazine (it first appeared as “Sense of Beauty”), McKay tried to convince Max Eastman of its merits. (Although McKay was executive editor of the Liberator at the time, Eastman, as the founder, still had the last word.) “Max is not interested in an international aesthetic of the arts,” McKay told Ogden. “He is strangely individualistic. He is interested in a revolutionary expression of art in a general way, but does not go beyond that” (McKay to Ogden, October 2, 1921, Ogden Papers). The Foundations of Aesthetics was eventually published in New York by International in 1925. The Women’s Dreadnought became the Workers’ Dreadnought in 1917 (see Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst, 55). Like Ogden, the militant suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960)

Notes to Pages 105–107

45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

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wrote on a variety of topics; her books included Education of the Masses (1924), The Home Front: A Mirror to Life in England during the First World War (1932), Housing and the Workers’ Revolution: Housing in Capitalist Britain and Bolshevik Russia (1917, 1925), The Suffrage Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (1931), and Writ on Cold Slate (1922), a collection of prison poems. Patricia W. Romero, E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical (Yale University Press, 1987); McKay, A Long Way from Home, 76–79. McKay, A Long Way from Home, 76–79. Sylvia Pankhurst’s political tilt away from a strict suffrage focus to an international outlook caused friction with her mother and sister, who were staunchly nationalist in their outlook and narrow in their concerns. It would come to a head over the Dreadnought’s prolabor and pacifist stand during World War I, a divide that also separated Ogden from an older generation of radicals. Christabel Pankhurst, for instance, encouraged women to have a “greater political radius” than mere interest in the vote, particularly in time of war—a sentiment supported by her mother. But that radius involved patriotism and female moral support. Christabel and her mother would later denounce “Bolshevik agitators and traitorous pacifists,” which included Sylvia, McKay, and her circle (Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst, 45; Christabel Pankhurst, “The Great Need of Vigorous National Defence against the German Peril,” qtd. in the Manchester Guardian, September 9, 1915). Ibid. Both Davis in Sylvia Pankhurst and Romero in E. Sylvia Pankhurst, two important works on Pankhurst, are in error on when McKay became involved at the Workers’ Dreadnought. It was not as the radical “Cardiff negro” who had written an angry letter to the newspaper on April 24, 1920, but as a featured poet in fall 1919. Neglecting to mention this in their otherwise thorough analyses of the Dreadnought years downplays McKay’s poetic presence in London. Romero also notes that McKay never received a byline while a reporter for the Dreadnought—yet his name was displayed prominently with his poetry and commentaries. Occasionally, he wrote under a pseudonym, but that was common with many writers of the day, including his mentor, C. K. Ogden. McKay to Ogden, April 30, 1920, Ogden Papers. James Wood, “The Hideousness of Modern Art,” Cambridge Magazine, summer 1920, 14, 16. Ibid. Upon his return to the United States, McKay was mindful of those discussions with Ogden and Wood; he wrote Ogden in 1922: “Over here they have the craziest and most confused ideas about men like Roger Fry, Nevinson, and Wyndham Lewis and others who are able propagandists. It would be such fun if you or Wood or both together would put them in their places and mention the few that are really accomplishing something in England and whether any are under the influence of your beloved Cézanne” (McKay to Ogden, 1922, Ogden Papers). McKay used his anonymity in London to address a series of racist attacks under the banner “Black Troops Terror” in the Herald, a newspaper that espoused radical ideas and was published by Labour Party leader George Lansbury, who happened to be a suffragist and friend of the Pankhursts. The article insinuated that if “savages” (the term the newspaper used for African soldiers during World War I) had been used successfully in the fight against Germany, what was to prevent their use “against workers here and elsewhere.” Speaking in the guise of a Cardiff Negro,“one of the oppressed,” McKay commented (sarcastically, in a comradely salute “from one radical to another”) that “it was the duty of [Lansbury’s] paper as a radical organ to enlighten its readers about the reason why the English considered coloured troops undesirable in Europe” (A Long Way from Home, 75, qtd. in Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst,

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59. 60.

61. 62.

63.

64.

65. 66.

Notes to Pages 107–109

105). He condemned Lansbury for “appealing to illogical emotional prejudices.” He was particularly outraged that the editor, a one-time candidate for the Women’s Suffrage Party, would play into the national hysteria of accusing blacks of being counterrevolutionary and anti-Labour (see Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst; Herald,April 10, 1920; Workers’ Dreadnought, April 24, 1920; McKay, A Long Way from Home, 75). McKay,“Socialism and the Negro,” 1, 2. McKay to Cunard, April 30, 1932, Cunard Collection.This club was also the place, I suspect, where McKay received inspiration for his novel Home to Harlem, which begins in England and is about a U.S. soldier in World War I. Ibid., September 18, 1932, Cunard Collection. McKay,“Socialism and the Negro,” 1, 2. McKay introduced Sylvia Pankhurst to the English membership at the International Club, where she became acquainted with “Socialists, Communists, anarchists, syndicalists, one-big-unionists and trade unionists, soap-boxers, and protesters, scribblers, and editors of little radical sheets” (McKay, “Up to Date,” 2–4; McKay, A Long Way from Home, 68). McKay,“Up to Date,” 4. McKay to Ogden, 1920, Ogden Papers.“I was telling a young acquaintance, an anarchist idealist, of the different way in which you talked about art and he is wondering whether he might see you sometime,” McKay wrote Ogden of one political artist. Another time he was more suggestive: “I gave Bernard your address.” McKay had taken Bernard to the famous Cézanne show in London, and it is interesting to imagine him and Bernard at the same galleries and concerts that the Bloomsbury crowd and Cambridge intellectuals frequented. McKay liked Cézanne, but “I couldn’t get my friend’s conception of it. He was preoccupied with the women’s bodies and the flesh tints, which I also admired for the softness and harmony with the whole. But Bernard was looking at it from a sex viewpoint. At present he is obsessed with sex” (ibid., April 30, 1920, Ogden Papers). Another time, McKay seemed to reverse roles, pricking at Ogden’s female masquerade as Adelyne More. He wrote of a disappointing afternoon at the British Museum, accompanied by “a woman who had lived in Egypt.” McKay complained that she was “stupid and dull” and wrote wistfully, “I should have liked so much to be in the Egyptian room with you” (ibid., April 2, 1920, Ogden Papers). McKay to Ogden, undated, Ogden Papers. McKay tells of an incident while he was living in London of a hustler, “a North of England youth,” who “existed by blackmailing the furtive gentlemen who haunted Hyde Park.” The youth admitted to being political—a communist, in fact—but preyed on homosexual men out of “hatred of the social system” (McKay, “Up to Date,” 4). McKay to Ogden, April 2, 1920, Ogden Papers. Contrary to the rumor that he was shy and effeminate, McKay boasted to Ogden that he sent a South African “sprawling to the street” (ibid.). Shaw’s comment can be found in McKay, A Long Way from Home, 61, 64. McKay had to continually remind Ogden of his precarious footing—not only as a poet, but also as a black person up against Anglo-Saxon prejudices. He pointed out that only German, French, and Italian families rented to him. A French landlord complained that “English neighbors had taunted her about having a black person in her house.” In another incident, he had to live temporarily elsewhere because he had been driven out of his neighborhood (McKay,“Up to Date,” 2). Spring in New Hampshire, 17. This excerpt from McKay’s “Reminiscences” also appeared in the summer 1920 issue of Cambridge Magazine; it was omitted from Harlem Shadows. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1957), 8.

Notes to Pages 110–113

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67. Powers, “Women’s Degrees” (Cambridge Magazine, June 1920), 8. Florence and Anderson, C. K. Ogden, 58, qtd. in Ogden, Florence, and Marshall, Militarism versus Feminism, 23. In a January 27, 1912, Cambridge Magazine editorial, Ogden demanded that readers rally to a letter-writing campaign calling for a social club at Cambridge “where the academic or political exclusiveness of the existing institutions is avoided.” 68. In that summer 1920 issue of Cambridge Magazine appeared the manifesto of “the Symbolist Movement,” written by Richards and Ogden, which introduced and expanded on Welby’s notion of language; a follow-up piece by Adelyne More, the pseudonym Ogden preferred when he wrote about feminist issues, “What Is a Fact”; an essay by James Wood, “The Hideousness of Modern Art”; E. M. Forster’s antimilitarist “Hymn before Action” (though Forster had volunteered as a nurse during World War I); and a call by Eileen Power for co-education at Cambridge, which, all agreed, was sorely behind the times. 69. McKay to Ogden, March 7, 1920, Ogden Papers. 70. McKay was at odds with some of the major U.S. black intellectuals at the time. W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, believed Negro writing should be completely propagandistic and used for racial uplift. Du Bois saw neither uplift nor propaganda in McKay’s writing. See Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art” (Crisis, October 1926; reprinted in Lewis, Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, 100) and a continuation of that notion in Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (New Challenge, 1937; reprinted in ibid., 194), which likewise offered a rigid schema for black writing. Alain Locke, with whom McKay differed as well, had in mind an elite intellectual vanguard when he devised his New Negro in 1925. 71. McKay’s “Exhortation” did not make the cut for Cambridge Magazine but appeared later in Spring in New Hampshire. Another, earlier version, titled “Exhortation— 1919,” was published in the United States.The addition of the date to the U.S. version gives the impression that the poem was penned as an immediate response to the racial violence in 1919. McKay’s “Invocation,” written in 1914, is also about Africa. 72. Before McKay began working with Ogden, McKay’s poems were edited by Max Eastman, who had a predilection for “marching” river ice and “stern-lipped fish.” Eastman also wrote poetry; his first book was a slim volume of blank verse, Child of the Amazon and Other Poems (1913). 73. McKay to Ogden, March 12, 1920, Ogden Papers. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid.The poems “Black Fiend” and “Pariah,” which complement the famous “If We Must Die” and “White Fiend,” were never published. I have not been able to locate copies of them. 76. “Poems: Claude McKay,” Cambridge Magazine, summer 1920, 55–59. McKay needed to explain eucharis to Ogden, who was unfamiliar with the plant.“I thought you had it in Europe,” McKay wrote. “It is a plant allied to the lily family. In some parts we call it kisses, in others ‘Easter Lily,’ if I remember rightly. It is kind of a bowl-shaped flower, with oval petals and an orange heart” (McKay to Ogden, May 12, 1920, Ogden Papers). 77. McKay to Ogden,April 14, 1920, Ogden Papers. Possibly too biographical or revealing,“La Paloma in London” was omitted from Cambridge Magazine and Spring in New Hampshire. The poem finally appeared in the January 1922 issue of the Liberator. 78. Ogden’s deemotionalizing of language had much to do with how we speak through gender, racial, and national identities, and a mask was one way to cloak one’s identity and made one’s voice purer.Thus he would don a mask and recite verse or read his essays, so readers would get a clearer sense of meaning (Russo, I.A. Richards, 96). In much the same way, he used female pseudonyms, such as “Adelyne More,” to make his point that words are too dependent on cultural preconceptions for meaning (see Holden and Levy,“From Emotionalized Language”).

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Notes to Pages 114–118

79. McKay to Ogden, May 12, 1920, Ogden Papers. 80. Ibid., March 12, 1920, Ogden Papers. 81. Dowson was one of a number of minor poets McKay admired (Frank Crane, in the United States, was another). Part of the tragic generation, Dowson died in his twenties in 1900; he wrote “Cynara” in a fury of infatuation for the daughter of an innkeeper. 82. McKay to Ogden, March 12, 1920, Ogden Papers. 83. This intimate connection with nature occurs in “Jasmine,” where McKay writes of his lover’s scent mingling luxuriously with that of the jasmines “clustered around your cottage door,” evoking that old Jamaican woman in an earlier verse.The poem appeared as “Jasmines” in the August 1921 Liberator. 84. McKay, “In Memoriam: Booker T. Washington,” in Cooper, The Passion of Claude McKay. 85. McKay to Ogden, 1922, Ogden Papers. 86. This dialogical encounter in London, where diaspora and Englishness merge for McKay, becomes an aesthetic playing field.“When I went away to America, I studied poetry to become modern and began writing sonnets and blank verse,” McKay told Ogden (McKay to Ogden, March 26, 1920, Ogden Papers). 87. Ibid., February 25, 1920, Ogden Papers. McKay neglected to mention Ezerman in his autobiography, A Long Way from Home. Instead, McKay wrote that the Grays, a rather nice English couple whom he met through Walter Jekyll, had come to his financial rescue and made the arrangements for his trip to England. McKay ended the entry in his autobiography enigmatically, commenting that the Grays went off to Spain while he went off to England (A Long Way From Home, 42–44). 88. The plan, when McKay and Ezerman traveled to London, was for McKay to find a publisher while Ezerman resumed his research on “the Negro,” with McKay’s help, at the British Museum. Ezerman’s project seemed related to updating W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Negro, published in 1915.The Dutch patron also provided the money for the poet’s return trip to New York and gave him a deadline for completing the book project. 89. I.A. Richards, who wrote the preface to Spring in New Hampshire, would become an outstanding scholar at Harvard. His critical work Practical Criticism: A Study in Literary Judgment (1929) is the foundation for reader-response theory, whose method “gave the study of literature in the university a new empirical basis drawn explicitly from psychology.” Richards’s detailed examination of students’ written responses to sample poems enabled him “to catalogue and describe the mental processes readers used in reading and misreading texts” ( J.A.Appleyard, Becoming a Reader [New York, 1990], 5; qtd. in Holden and Levy, “From Emotionalized Language,” 88). Ogden’s influence on Richards, especially his insistent international perspective, was long lasting.Years later at Harvard, Richards was asked if he was a political person.“I am, I suppose, apolitical,” he replied, “seeing that the only politics that interest me are world politics” (“Fundamentally, I’m an Inventor,” interview of Richards by Jane Watkins, Harvard Magazine 76 [September 1973]: 50, qtd. in Russo, I. A. Richards, 160.) 90. McKay to Ogden, August 4, 1920, Ogden Papers. 91. Ezerman, for instance, compiled a seventy-page alphabetical listing of Chinese and Japanese emperors, including mikados and shoguns of Japan, which he published in 1893. 92. Ezerman to McKay, June 18, 1920, Ogden Papers.The “sex-passion sonnets” might have been poems written about Ezerman or homoerotic pieces in Constab Ballads. It is interesting that McKay wrote to Ogden that he wanted him to refer, in his introduction, only to Songs of Jamaica. “Constab Ballads is so very bad,” McKay explained. “I didn’t want to publish them but Mr. Jekyll urged me to. I consented as

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he was paying for the production, but I thought it was a great failure” (McKay to Ogden, May 12, 1920, Ogden Papers). 93. McKay portrayed his patron as “a powerfully sexed person who is ashamed of his passion”—which might have been an allusion to a more overt expression of homosexuality by Ogden and McKay (McKay to Ogden, October 9, 1920, Ogden Papers). 94. “Battle” appeared under the pen name Hugh Hope in the October 9, 1920, Workers’ Dreadnought, where McKay was a contributor and editor. The dream motif for McKay was latticed into other poems and themes as well. “A Dream,” for instance, is about the dilemma of leaving Jamaica; “Dreams,” a later poem, is an anguished nightmare of the poet’s struggles with his exile in Europe and a past “of dear dead things.”“Dreams” is part of “New Poems,” Johnson Collection. 95. McKay to Ogden, June 23, 1920, Ogden Papers. In another letter, McKay complained of Ezerman’s being “quite mercenary”; aesthetically, he had to be approached “from his own standpoint.” So angry was Ezerman over the editorial changes that he considered ending the book project, and McKay’s relationship with Ogden. “Was there not a different ending to ‘I Shall Return’?” he asked. “This one runs more smoothly but I think the other much more living, and the sudden note of sorrow after the joyous opening lines much more striking and true. ‘To O.E.A.’ was new to me. It is very fine but ‘wet with music’ is something of a puzzle, and the end, especially the third-last line, is not up to the rest. It seems to me that a note to ‘Alfonso,’ explaining where you heard him, would not have been superfluous” (Ezerman to McKay, June 18, 1920, Ogden Papers). When McKay told Ezerman that Ogden suggested they be cut, Ezerman nearly pulled his financing of the book. 96. McKay to Ogden, June1920, Ogden Papers. 97. Ibid., August 17, 1920, Ogden Papers. 98. Ogden,“Poems: Claude McKay,” Cambridge Magazine, June 1920, 55. 99. Ezerman to McKay, June 18, 1920, Ogden Papers. McKay later explained to Ogden that Ezerman heard the performance in ragtime, which gave it a totally modern feel.“However, he isn’t altogether wrong about the orchestra,” McKay added.“ ‘Listen to the Lambs’ was the nearest thing to any of the old sorrow songs.” But McKay found the performance, in general, without balance.“Buddy and his drum was more than noisy and practically drowned out the whole band.” Still, McKay was more irritated by the inability of his two white patrons to discern simple changes of tempo and rhythm (McKay to Ogden, Saturday, Ogden Papers). 100. Ezerman to McKay, June 18, 1920, Ogden Papers. 101. McKay to Ogden, Saturday, Ogden Papers.There seemed less camaraderie and connection between McKay and Ezerman. “I couldn’t work in close harmony with him,” McKay explained. “He would be nice, but possessed little tricks of manner, more pronounced in his own country, which exasperated me” (McKay to Ogden, February 25, 1920, Ogden Papers). 102. McKay to Ogden, May 18, 1920, Ogden Papers. McKay’s later novel, Banana Bottom, includes comments on this infatuation with primitive art, and Ogden may have been the inspiration, particularly since McKay viewed his opinion as representative of the art establishment’s. Ogden and McKay spent time together not only at the British Museum and galleries, but also at lectures, at plays by Shaw, Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett, and at free concerts.They both liked opera, and one performance in particular McKay compared to a free concert at Smith Place on City Road days later. The soloist, “one Miss Winnifred Lawson, had a beautiful voice,” he commented. “She sang two lyrics from The Magic Flute, which were much better than the girl at the opera” (ibid.). 103. Ogden,“Recent Verse, 117, quoting a review in Westminister. 104. McKay to Ogden, October 9, 1920, Ogden Papers.

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Notes to Pages 122–124

105. Richards, preface to Spring in New Hampshire. At first McKay preferred to have either Bernard Shaw, whose work he admired, write a few words, or “a cultured man who is a good judge of fine things.”And at one point McKay suggested that Ogden do the introduction himself. In “A Black Briton Comes ‘Home,’ ” Cooper and Reinders claim that Shaw declined the offer when he was approached by Ogden (76). But there is no indication of this in McKay’s letters. McKay actually sent Ogden a “draft of the sort of introduction I should like for the book” and suggested: “If you don’t mind my saying it, I don’t see why you cannot sign it—with your degree as ‘Ed. of the C.M’ ” (McKay to Ogden, June 19, 1920, Ogden Papers). Ogden convinced McKay that Shaw would be a poor choice for the introduction, an opinion the poet does not reveal in his autobiography A Long Way from Home, simply noting that Shaw declined.“Now I come to think that an introduction by Shaw or any well-known man would have spoiled the effect—too loud for such a little thing,” commented the poet to Ogden.“I cannot think of a successful literary man, conscious that he was introducing an unknown writer, in just the way Richards has written” (McKay to Ogden, October 9, 1920, Ogden Papers). 106. “I like this very much,” Richards wrote Ogden.“I’ve made a few notes of stops and of places when my ear asks for some change of rhythm” (Richards to Ogden, n.d., Ogden Papers). 107. McKay to Ogden, October 9, 1920, Ogden Papers. McKay wrote Ogden that Ezerman was pleased in general with the book. His about-face, however, might have been due to an appeal to narcissism—McKay dedicated the title poem to Ezerman (ibid.). 108. Hall,“Introduction,” 4. 109. McKay,“The Years Between,” in “New Poems,” Johnson Collection. 110. McKay to Ogden, February 25, 1920, Ogden Papers. Gustav Noske was commander of the German armed forces during the war. In January 1919, however, with the end of the war, he ordered the suppression of all radicals when domestic unrest erupted. A second popular uprising, instigated by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, against the imperial regime was brutally put down, and the two leaders summarily executed. French general Ferdinand Foch was president of the Allied Military Committee at Versailles in 1920 and the commander of Allied forces during the war. In the Second Battle of Marne in July 1918, thirty-five thousand deaths resulted when he ordered the advance on fortified machine-gun positions. His insanity was recorded for posterity:“My centre is giving way, my right is retreating; situation excellent. I shall attack.” 111. McKay to Ogden, October 9, 1920, Ogden Papers. McKay’s departure was of course political as well. He later boasted in A Long Way from Home that the information that led to the police raid on the Dreadnought office and the arrest of Sylvia Pankhurst had come from a disgruntled sailor whom he befriended as a go-between—a fitting end to his time in London (83; see also Lindberg’s interesting account of this incident in “Rebels to the Right,” 37). Pankhurst was eventually tried for treason and spent six months in prison on charges that she incited mutiny among the armed forces. (Her prison experiences can be found in a collection of her poems, Writ on Cold Slate.) She died in December 1960 in self-exile in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which recalls another expatriate who renounced English society,Walter Jekyll and his self-exile in Jamaica. She was, her biographer noted, the “only foreigner buried in an area reserved for the patriots of the Italian war” (Romero, E. Sylvia Pankhurst, xi).

Chapte r 6

Cro ssing the Shadow-Line

The chapter epigraph is from Hart Crane,“Black Tambourine.” 1. McKay,“Rest in Peace,” Spring in New Hampshire, 21.

Notes to Pages 124–128

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2. There are many similarities to Shakespeare’s navigational metaphors, as in Sonnet 56: “Let this interim like the ocean be / Which parts the shore, where twocontracted new / Come daily to the banks.” 3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Biographia Literaria,” in Coleridge: Selected Poetry and Prose (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 268–275. 4. The Liberator version, originally titled “After the Winters,” was edited by Eastman and appeared in July 1919, several months before McKay’s trip to London. 5. McKay wrote numerous poems on the city, particularly on his return to New York. Unlike other Harlem writers, McKay chronicled the less glorious service-industry workforce discriminated against by the trade unions and mocked by the black elite. 6. McKay to Ogden, February 25, 1920, Ogden Papers; McKay,“Up to Date,” 1. 7. This dainty Spring in New Hampshire, with additional poems from the Liberator, became firmly wedded to an emerging Harlem Renaissance aesthetic. McKay left for Russia soon after its publication to attend the Third International in November, where he lectured and wrote on the “Negro question.” He had little time for promotion, though the book received adequate praise for its “honest poetry” and “subtle gradations of thought and of feeling” (Stirling Rowen, book review, Detroit News, July 16, 1922, 7;Walter F.White, “The Negro’s Contribution,” Bookman, July 1922, 531). He stayed in Russia for six months. 8. Child of the Amazon was reviewed in Survey Graphic (“The Muse and the ‘Causes,’ ” July 5, 1913, 489).The reviewer’s advice was not to “abandon the Muse for Causes, however sacred,” which Eastman seemed to have ignored completely. 9. “Claude,” Eastman wrote in the biographical note in Selected Poems of Claude McKay, “was ironical and mischievous too, and acutely intelligent both about people and politics. His laughter at the frailties of his friends and enemies, no matter which— that high, half-wailing falsetto laugh of the reckless delighted Darky—was the center of my joy in him throughout our friendship of more than thirty years” (7). 10. McKay to Ogden, August 7, 1920, Ogden Papers (emphasis in the original). 11. Ibid. McKay also wanted to keep the preface by I.A. Richards or include a new one written by Ogden. 12. Eastman’s entitlement seems to have come from his mother,Annis, who had worked with Frederick Douglass in the late nineteenth century.Annis Eastman studied theology at Oberlin College (one of the first women to do so) and became involved with Thomas K. Beecher’s Park Church in Elmira, New York, which was founded as an abolitionist church after it broke with its more traditional Presbyterian congregation (O’Neill, Last Romantic, 5). 13. Eastman, Masses, May 1915, qtd. in O’Neill, Echoes of Revolt, 232.This white-glossed perception of blacks became institutionalized in Harold Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) along an ever-narrowing Left/Right axis, completing the political foundation begun by Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” in 1937. Cruse’s work continued to influence scholars in the 1960s and 1970s as to the motivation of black artistic production.Yet his thesis today makes us painfully aware of a racial body in varying states of incompleteness, archived or discarded because it would not bend precisely because of that political discourse. 14. McKay to Ogden, 1922, Ogden Papers. When McKay returned to the United States, Eastman had become older and lazier, and McKay complained to Ogden that it was difficult to interest Eastman in completing the work on Harlem Shadows (ibid., January 31, 1921, Ogden Papers). 15. Rorty, “A Review of Weary Blues by Langston Hughes (Knopf ),” New Masses, October 1926, 26. 16. McKay to Cunard, December 1, 1931, Cunard Collection. Cunard had asked for advice in assembling material for The Negro Anthology, and McKay believed, somewhat naively, that Cunard would be more sensitive than Eastman and Rorty to the

182

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

Notes to Pages 129–133

range of black opinion. Cunard was, as is apparent in the huge assemblage of material in the anthology. By the 1950s, Eastman had become a shabby huckster for McCarthyism. He turned on old Masses editors, such as Floyd Dell and Dorothy Day, and became a founding board member of the National Review. Unlike his impoverished comrades from the 1920s, who included McKay, Eastman continued to live the high life well into the 1960s (and had a following among New Left radicals). But there still is the matter of his mysteriously inflated salary as roving editor at Reader’s Digest. Unemployable veterans, particularly those maimed and psychologically wounded, were an issue in England, which had instituted compulsory military service. “The commanders who now make speeches about the virtues inculcated by military service are the very men who induced us to establish the short-service system by testifying that the old soldier was a humbug. The fact that the agencies for finding employment for discharged soldiers are still very unsuccessful shows that the young soldier is no greater a favorite, except in war pictures, than the old one was” (Shaw, Fabianism and the Empire, 39). Internationalists like Ogden opted for conscientiousobjector status during the war instead of glorious service to the nation. Untermeyer’s “Any City” appeared in the July 1913 issue of the Masses, Gibson’s “Lies” in the October 1913 issue. Both are reprinted in O’Neill, Echoes of Revolt, 187, 195. Isobel Armstrong writes in Victorian Poetry:“The doubleness of language is not local but structural. It must be read closely, but loosely. It is not the disorganized expression of subjectivity, but a way of exploring and interrogating the grounds of its representation.What the Victorian achieved was often two concurrent poems in the same words” (12). Later critics such as Addison Gayle saw these “working women” as not being accepted into the “human family” until they had undergone “a spiritual baptism.” These “prostitutes,” as he calls them, are of an “inferior status” and “evoke pity and condescension.” But Gayle and others miss the point. McKay is delineating an industry that worked in the shadows of New York. Its illegality was tolerated; it coexisted with Prohibition. Many of these women worked unprotected, undercover, off the books, and at the whim and mercy of employers, as many in those shadow industries still do today. They are all creations of this “stern harsh world” (Gayle, Claude McKay, 25–27). The trade in women was going on at the same time the lynching of blacks in the South was epidemic, and it became so critical that the U.S. Congress enacted the Mann Act in 1910, which prohibited the transportation of females across state or international borders for immoral purposes. McKay was aware of the paradox and irony that drove women to the margins.The trade flourished in the racially heated climate of Harlem and was exacerbated by the unfair wages paid women in other fields. Blake, “And Did Those Feet.” Blake’s pastoral of a “green & permanent Land” is filled with religious meaning, however, much like the ploughman’s song. Braithwaite,“Some Contemporary Poetry,” 275. Ibid.,“The Negro in American Literature,” 40. McKay’s Negroes in America was published in Russian. An English translation appeared in 1979, published by Lennikat Press. McKay wrote Max Eastman in May 1923 that “you may not be able to see me for some time. Uncertain as to time myself. But you can address me to Amer Express—Berlin” (McKay to Eastman, Petrograd, May 1923, in W. Cooper, The Passion of Claude McKay, 90;W. Cooper, Claude McKay, 193). The Federal Bureau of Investigation considered McKay “very active” in communist circles, according to a March 26, 1923, memo. Eric Walrond, as did other New

Notes to Pages 133–134

28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

183

Negroes, took it as fact that McKay’s sojourn in Europe was as an agent. Rumors circulated that he traveled under wraps, code named “Sasha” and “engaged in selling forged passports in Germany.” He was also tagged “a confidential man” for Sylvia Pankhurst, another internationalist, when he was an editor of the Dreadnought in 1920. McKay wrote later: “Walrond (in a widely reprinted article) said I had been invited to Russia by the Soviet government and the impression was that I had become a bolshevik agent,” McKay wrote Cunard on September 18, 1932 (Cunard Collection).“A lie. I had to peddle autographed copies of poems, bum my friends and work as a fireman from N.Y. to Liverpool to get to Russia. And although the bolsheviks tried to make me represent the Negro race, I let them know that I was a free spirit, a poet although politically my sympathies were communist.” The poet’s notoriety involved a full-press all-ports alert by the State and Justice Departments to apprehend McKay along with two other “Negro delegates.” Newly appointed to the case, J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that the poet carried incendiary “secret messages” from Leon Trotsky, supposedly in the form of an open letter published in Izvestia, for “the organization of the black race in the United States.” (It was probably just his tattered author’s copy of The Negroes in America, which had just been translated into Russian.) In June 1923, agents in Charleston, South Carolina, were informed of the “negro Radical Claude McKay,” suspected of “returning via the West Indies,” though landfall could be anywhere along the southern coastline. (How ironic that the government tracked a fugitive coming from the West Indies, since Charleston was the port used by many U.S. slaves to flee to the Caribbean when England ended its part in the slave trade in the 1830s.) As late as October 1923, he was still believed to be in Russia, but by his own accounting, he was in Hamburg, having “the bummiest holiday in my life,” he wrote Grace Campbell, down on his luck with the grippe. “My life here is very unsatisfactory for a propagandist,” he admitted, “cadging a meal off people who are not at all sympathetic to my social ideas” (W. Cooper, Claude McKay, 210).There are sixty pages in McKay’s government file, which covers the period from January 1923 to May 1940, when he applied for U.S. citizenship. Ironically, McKay had written about just such a “spectre” in a May 1922 Liberator —one that intrudes “into the holy place” of the whites: “Poor painful blackface,” the poet lamented of his trans-Atlantic predicament, thrust onto him unwilling.“How like a spectre you haunt the pale devils!” Now, six months later, all seemed surreal.This English-trained lyricist had suddenly grown mythic dimensions—and larger than that black-faced radical conjured by Eastman and Rorty. He had become, in fact, a “great unspeakable ghost of Western Civilization” (McKay, “He Who Gets Slapped,” Liberator, May 1922, 24–25; rept. In W. Cooper, The Passion of Claude McKay, 71–72). Quotes in this paragraph appear in Bruning, “Stadtluft macht frei!” 80–81, 83, 86. McKay to Cunard, April 30, 1932, Cunard Collection. McKay,“Berlin,” in “New Poems,” Johnson Collection. McKay, A Long Way from Home, 231. Much of those two years was spent recovering from syphilis, and then from influenza caught while modeling nude at Nina Hammets’s studio. He also became severely depressed (possibly a result of a syphilitic attack) and was assigned to a dingy Paris hospital ward. Still, McKay was able to influence a younger, more international group of intellectuals from Martinique, who published La Revue du Monde Noir. Years later, in November 1932, McKay suffered another breakdown and traveled to a sanitorium in Berlin. He had been working on Banjo and had just moved to Morocco and was getting the manuscript ready for Rieder, the French publisher, when he became ill. McKay thought it was a return of syphilis but then realized it was the real thing—a mental breakdown. Sometime before, his apartment had been ransacked and his carte d’identité taken. McKay

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33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

Notes to Pages 134–138

admitted to Nancy Cunard that he found it “hard to do any thinking because of the continuous noises in my head” (McKay to Cunard, November 28, 1932, Cunard Collection). “The Desolate City” first appeared under the stark title “Desolate” in a Caribbean issue of Opportunity in November 1926 but was probably in circulation before then, since it also appeared in Countee Cullen’s Caroling the Dusk in 1927.The title was changed to “The Desolate City” when it was included in The Selected Poems of Claude McKay in 1953. Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 466. Ten years after McKay wrote “The Desolate City,” Alice Hamilton chronicled the rise of Nazism in “The Sound and the Fury in Germany” for the Survey Graphic (November 1933): “Matters were moving with lightning speed, so that people dreaded to open their morning papers lest they find some new devastating governmental decree,” the author noted;“there was much that was still only foreshadowed, there was hope that the whole program might not be put through. . . . The working-class quarters of Berlin in April were waiting, breathless, silent, to hear what their fate was to be.” In McKay’s 1953 Selected Poems, the word city in the second line was added; spirit appears in the unpublished “New Poems,” as well as in Caroling the Dusk, Cullen’s 1927 anthology. Eastman agreed that “The Desolate City” was McKay’s finest work. Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 466. Christian, “Spirit Bloom in Harlem: The Search for a Black Aesthetic during the Harlem Renaissance: The Poetry of Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University), 15, Schomburg Collection. Ibid. Fanon writes in Black Skin,White Mask:“What is often called the black soul is a white man’s artifact.” McKay, however, questioned if that “black soul” of Fanon’s analysis can ever truly be sealed completely in blackness (Bhabha, “Life at the Border,” 30–31). McKay to Louise Bryant Bullitt, June 24, 1926, Johnson Collection; qtd. in W. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner, 229. Pavel,“The World Over,” 786. Ibid. Michel Fabré notes “an almost mythical element” to the city, “largely because of its role as the gateway to Africa and of the international atmosphere of its harbor” (From Harlem to Paris, 109). Douglass,“My Foreign Travels Abroad,”“Papers of Frederick Douglass.” McKay, Banjo, 68–69, 277. McKay, A Long Way from Home, 218. McKay to Cunard, April 31, 1932, Cunard Collection. McKay,“Tanger,” in “New Poems,” Johnson Collection. Before and during World War I, Tangier was characterized as “anomalous” and its cosmopolitan character shaped through a series of treaties that had balkanized the surrounding geography into “capitulations.” Its modern charm was forged out of the British Moroccan Treaty of 1856 and the Spanish Moroccan Treaty of 1861. One accord, between France and Spain in 1904, spelled out how that charm should be expressed: “The town of Tangier shall preserve the special character which it owes to the presence of the Diplomatic Corps and to its municipal and Public Health privileges” (qtd. in “Tangier: A Study in Internationalisation,” International Quarterly, 349). W. Cooper, Claude McKay, 271. McKay,“Xauen,” in “New Poems,” Johnson Collection. McKay to Cunard, April 31, 1932, Cunard Collection. Bowles, Without Stopping, 148.

Notes to Pages 139–140

Po stsc ri pt

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1848–1919

The chapter epigraph is from McKay, A Long Way from Home, 300. 1. McKay, “Travail,” Workers’ Dreadnought, January 10, 1920. The dominant colors in “Travail” are crimson and scarlet, evoking the feminist tradition; and the struggle here is not so much of black against white, but of old over new voices. Europe becomes “the raven” and spreads its pinions; the toiler, in the position of the yielding female, bends to her mighty task. “Crimson” implies sacrifice, death, and rebirth, particularly after the failure of the revolution of 1917 and international unrest in 1919. But, importantly for McKay, crimson clover is a durable plant—a weed of the most common variety of clover—and the poet makes connections, aesthetically, to his earlier colonial synthesis in Jamaica. 2. The New Negro and New Humanist were both resistant, in crucial ways, to revolutionary ideas that broke with historical practices of maintaining an elite culture. Vanguardism, which internationalism eschewed, is at the center of much of the politics of the early twentieth century.The New Negro, for instance, is an evolution of Du Bois’s Talented Tenth, while New Humanists such as T. S. Eliot derided popular tastes—the masses in general—as degenerate. Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) was a leading practitioner of New Humanism in the United States. While, arguably, McKay might have agreed with much of their “middle approach” to literature and culture, he would have been alarmed by their elitist attitudes. 3. This odious word, preparedness, took away from much-needed social welfare projects, many internationalists believed. Crystal Eastman, an international feminist and close friend to McKay, for instance, formed an “antipreparedness group” in 1916 to work against the powerful propaganda machinery that promoted war through specters of terrorism. Giving in to such fears and anxieties, she believed, was groundwork for rationalizing the war and implementing the draft. Her antipreparedness was simple:“To repeal conscription where it has crept into our laws, to keep Congress from passing the Chamberlain Bill for universal training, to keep the other states from following New York—to hold the fort for liberty over here, until the nations are actually gathering to establish lasting peace—until, in short, every fool can see the folly of war preparations” (C. Eastman, “War and Peace”). Eastman networked with other labor and feminist groups and formed defense committees when dockworker Patrick Quinlan was arrested.And when she became executive director of the American Union against Militarism in 1916, she used her clout to lobby exclusively against the special interests that promoted preparedness. A year earlier, she organized a massive telegram campaign urging President Wilson to “call for a conference of neutral nations with a view to establishing peace” (qtd. in John M. Craig,“The Women’s Peace Party and Questions of Gender Separatism,” Peace and Change 19 [October 1994]: 373–409). 4. Léon de Montluc, Les Etats-Unis d’Europe, supplément spécial, Paris, 1922. Emile Faguet in Le Pacifism, qtd. in W. Cooper, The Passion of Claude McKay, 26). McKay wrote of such a spectre and summarized the situation for many who were émigrés and expatriates from other countries in his remark:“How they burn up their energies trying to keep you out” (“He Who Gets Slapped,” 71–72). 5. S. Cooper,“Concepts of Internationalism,” 24. 6. Helen Pitts, Douglass’s close secretary for many years, was born into a well-known abolitionist family. A graduate of Mount Holyoke Seminary, she had been working on the radical feminist publication Alpha in Washington, D.C., when she and Douglass met.After their marriage, their home became a meeting place for women from around the world, and host to National Woman Suffrage Association meetings throughout the 1880s.

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Notes to Pages 140–141

7. Douglass, March 31, 1888, address, Frederick Douglass Papers. This groundbreaking meeting would clear the way for international feminists in the twentieth century. One descendant, organized by Crystal Eastman in 1921, was the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.“I have done very little in this world in which to glory except this one act,” remarked Douglass, in appreciation of the support of the women’s movement for human rights,“and I certainly glory in that.When I ran away from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act” (ibid.) Before Douglass spoke, there was a brief “moment of silence” to honor recently deceased cofounder Lucretia Mott. The meeting inaugurated the International Council of Women, took place in Washington, D.C., between March 25 and April 1, 1888, and Douglass was the first speaker, introduced by Susan B. Anthony and followed by Lucy Stone, Henry B. Blackwell, Robert Purvis, Samuel C. Pomeroy, May Wright Sewall, and others. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, another organizer from the Seneca Fall days, presided as president. 8. On February 20, 1895, the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C., gave Douglass a standing ovation—on the very day he died. It would be a blessing, as the issues the NCW worked on included the rising tide of war and race-gender discrimination.Whether the issue was self-determination (as with Ireland) or suffrage, Douglass’s presence would be a continual reminder to fellow abolitionists and a younger generation of internationalists of “the incompleteness of our work” in the years and decades ahead (Frederick Douglass Papers). 9. The pamphlet was published in 1893 and reprinted by the University of Illinois Press in 1999. 10. Douglass,“Our Composite Nationality:An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on 7 December 1869,” Frederick Douglass Papers, 256. Douglass was critical of England, as well, and advocated Irish home rule at a time when the U.S. government was attempting to negotiate a trade agreement with Canada. “This is not my hour. England does not want to know what Frederick Douglass has to say on the subject of Home rule for Ireland. . . . When we had the great battle with slavery, why, they welcomed Frederick Douglass, and they welcomed any and every other man who came there to ask their sympathy in behalf of the cause of liberty.” He pointed out that there is no such thing as “limiting the spirit of liberty.” It is like “the sun in the heavens—it shines for all” (Frederick Douglass Papers, 273–277). 11. Douglass,“Our Composite Nationality,” 256. 12. Douglass was a firm believer in agitation. He once explained his reasons for lecturing: “I was compelled to comply by three reasons: First, I believe in the cause of woman; second, because I believe in agitation; and third, because I gratefully appreciate the services rendered by women to the cause of emancipation” (“Woman Suffrage,” a lecture on May 24, 1886 at Tremont Temple, Boston, Massachusetts, 1, in Douglass,“Papers of Frederick Douglass”). 13. Douglass,“God Almighty Made But One Race,” Washington Post, January 26, 1884, Frederick Douglass Papers, 145. “Ignorant, degraded, and repulsive as the Negro was during his 200 years of slavery, he was sufficiently attractive to make possible an intermediate race of a million more or less of the Caucasian variety. If this has taken place in the face of those odious barriers what is likely to occur when man puts away his ignorance and degradation and becomes educated and prosperous?” (ibid). 14. Frederick Douglass, “The Future of the Negro,” North American Review, July 1884. 15. Douglass, “Woman Suffrage,” 4, “Papers of Frederick Douglass.”These radicals later identified themselves as “male suffragists” and formed such associations as the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, a group that included William Dean Howells, John Dewey, Samuel Untermeyer, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and Max Eastman. Another

Notes to Pages 141–142

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

187

member was Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of the famous abolitionist and one of the founders of the NAACP and the Crisis. His mother, Fanny Garrison Villard, led a women’s rights march up Fifth Avenue on August 29, 1914, at seventy years of age. In England, the Pankhursts would follow a similar line, from abolition to internationalism.The New York League, spearheaded by Max Eastman, brother of Crystal, coincided with Emmeline Pankhurst’s rousing lecture at the Hudson Theatre in Greenwich Village in 1909. “It is unendurable,” she told a packed audience of a thousand eager to hear about the hunger strikers in London, “to think of another generation of women wasting their lives begging for the vote” (New York Times, November 30, 1909). Douglass, Frederick Douglass Papers, 273–277 Douglass,“Woman Suffrage,” 4. See the photographic exhibit, 1915–1919, in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection (www.swarthmore.edu/Library/peace/Exhibits), for some of those actions. Later, against the growing repression of internationalists by the government, Crystal Eastman helped organize the National Civil Liberties Bureau, along with Roger Baldwin and Norman Thomas, in 1917, when writers and antinationalist intellectuals were harassed or deported. It was the forerunner to the American Civil Liberties Union, and its founding members included Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Lillian Wald, Felix Frankfurter, Oswald Garrison Villard, Paul Underwood Kellogg, Clarence Darrow, John Dewey, Charles Beard, Abraham Muste, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Upton Sinclair. The Peace Party became the Women’s International League for Peace and Justice in 1921. Its papers can be found in the Peace Collection at Swarthmore University. S. Cooper,“Concepts of Internationalism,” 25. Crystal Eastman’s political networking marked the beginnings of a “peace history” in the twentieth century. Ultimately, the importance of Eastman is that she did not simply occupy a space in history, but rather made space for other histories that were emerging in the aftermath of World War I. In that sense, her importance extends beyond feminist concerns. A selection of Eastman’s writings appears in Crystal Eastman: On Woman and Revolution. C. Eastman,“War and Peace.” S. Cooper,“Concepts of Internationalism,” 23–24. The supremacy of liberal democracy parallels an end of history—or ideological struggle—as we know it.“The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period, there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual care taking of the museum of human history” (Francis Fukuyama,“The End of History,” National Interest, summer 1989).

B ibl iog raphy

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I nde x

abolitionism, 140 academia, rebellion against, 109–110 aesthetics: in Automotive Age, 92; bioregional, 72–73; idealization of folk, 76; identity and, 5–6 Africa, Olivier’s identity with, 29 “After the Winters” (McKay), 106, 125 annancy, 62; Jekyll and, 53–55 anticommunism, 17 “Any City” (Untermeyer), 129–130 Arnaud, Emile, 139 Arnold, Matthew, 20 art: as appropriation and reappropriation, 106–107; McKay’s insights from, 121–122; as propaganda, 16 Arts and Crafts movement, 24, 75, 86, 91, 93 Art Workers’ Guild, 93 Ashanti Wars, 30, 49 Automotive Age, 92 autonomy, Fabianism and, 31–32 Banana Bottom (McKay), 90 banana cultivation, 39–40 Banjo (McKay), 12, 137 “Barrier,The” (McKay), 106, 109 Basic English, as theory of ideal language, 101, 102–103 “Battle” (McKay), 120 Baudelaire, Charles, 6 “Beneath the Yampy Shade” (McKay), 90–91 Bentham, Jeremy, 13, 31 Berkman, Alexander, 143–144n

Besant, Annie, 25 Bhabha, Homi, 136 Bible Untrustworthy,The (W. Jekyll), 53, 66 “Biter Bit,The” (McKay), 50, 64, 79 “Black Fiend” (McKay), 111 Blake,William, 131 Bloomsbury group, 104 Bodichon, Barbara, 93–94 Bontemps, Arna, 17 Bourne, Randolph, 4 Bowles, Paul, 138 Boy’s Will, A (Frost), 105 Brabazon, Hercules, 53, 55 Braithwaite,William Stanley, 132 Bright, Jacob, 42 Brooke, Rupert, 7 Brooks,Van Wyck, 4, 12, 15, 17 Bryant, Louise, 136 Burne-Jones, Edward, 93 Burne-Jones, Georgiana, 93 Burns, Robert, 18, 56–58, 79 Butler, Kim, 10 Cambridge Magazine, 100, 106, 109, 118 Cannadine, David, 46 Carlyle,Thomas, 85 Cary, Joyce, 8 “Castaways” (McKay), 129, 132 Catholic Worker movement, 17 Cezanne, Paul, 106 Champion, Henry, 25, 26 Chandler, Owen, 14 Child of the Amazon and Other Poems (M. Eastman), 127

199

200

Index

Christopher, King, 16 cities: country vs., 4; expansion of, 85–86 Clarkson,Thomas, 30, 42 class: city and country related to, 4; and decadent lifestyle, 154n; poetry and, 92; race and, 107–108 class warfare, 24–25; socialism and, 26 Cobham, Rhonda, 56 colonialism: Constab Ballads reflects on, 70–71; Fabianism and, 31–32, 36–37; horticulture and, 49–50; impact on land, 38; postcolonial paradigm, 131–132; self-rule and, 37–38 Communism, 57; nationalism and, 108 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 25 conformity, 86 Conrad, Joseph, 5, 8, 128 Constab Ballads (McKay), 3, 68, 69–71 “Conventional Life” (M. Eastman), 127 Cooper, Sandi, 13, 140, 142 Cooper,Wayne F., 18 country, cities vs., 4 Country and the City,The (Williams), 4 Cowl, Carl, 23 Crane, Hart, 124 Creole, English liberalism and, 28 Crisis magazine, 13, 17 “Criteria of Negro Art” (Du Bois), 16 Cullen, Countee, 132 cultural inequity, language and, 102–104 cultural signage, 8 Cunard, Nancy, 107, 127–128, 133, 137 dance: and intellectual ideas, 116–117; poetics of movement, 14–15 Danticat, Edwidge, 9 “Darkling Thrush” (Harding), 129 Day, Dorothy, 17 “De Dog Rose” (McKay), 88–89 “De Gubnor’s Salary” (McKay), 44, 45 De Lisser, Herbert G., 32 Derrida, Jacques, 8, 89 “Desolate City,The” (McKay), 133–135

dialect, 102–103, 104, 114; aristocracypeasantry connection through, 54–55; poems, 58, 60 diaspora, 5; characteristics of, 147n; diasporic vision, 84; forced migrations and racialization, 147–148n; ideology and, 168n;“no-land-race” in, 83–84; Olivier’s identification with Africa, 29; routes and roots of, 145–146n Dickens, Charles, 59 Dockworkers’ Strike (1889), 5 “Dominant White,The” (McKay), 23, 27–28 Douglass, Frederick, 13, 30, 37, 137, 140–141, 149n Dover, Cedric, 17 Dowson, Ernest, 20, 114–115 “Dream, A” (McKay), 18, 20, 88 Dresser, Christopher, 94 Drury Club, 114 Du Bois,W.E.B., 13, 16, 17, 21, 30, 127, 133, 150n Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 11, 135 Durango (botanist), 94 Eastman, Crystal, 13, 14, 93, 99, 100, 104, 106, 141, 142 Eastman, Max, 16, 17, 22, 56, 69, 126–127, 129, 133, 137, 152n Edwards, Brent Hayes, 9, 10, 20 Eliot,T. S., 92, 100, 105, 113 English language: global English, 171n; insular and Eurocentric nature of, 102–103 Equiano, Olaudah, 7, 99, 100 Eurocentrism, in English language, 102–103 “Exhortation” (McKay), 111 Eyre, Edward John, 42, 85 Ezerman, J.L.J.F.E., 117–120 Fabianism, 3, 23; autonomy promoted by, 31–32; colonialism and, 36–37; development of, 24–25; Independent

Index

Socialist Party and, 36; land sustainability and, 39–40; land-use reform, 51 Fanon, Frantz, 135 fascism, 22 feminism, 140, 186n Festing, Sally, 76, 93 “Flame-Heart” (McKay), 65 “Flowers of Passion” (McKay), 116–117 folk aesthetics, idealization of, 76 folkways: Gertrude Jekyll’s interest in, 73–74 folk wisdom, 79 Ford, Charles Henri, 138 Frank,Waldo, 12, 72 Frost, Robert, 100, 105 Fry, Roger, 107 Fuller,Walter, 99, 100, 141 Garden: An Illustrated Weekly of Horticulture and All Its Branches, 85 gardening. See horticulture Gates, Henry Louis, 54 gender discrimination, 93 George, Henry, 13, 35 “George William Gordon to the Oppressed Natives” (McKay), 42–43 Gibson, Lydia, 130 Giles, James Richard, 18 Glissant, Edouard, 14 Gold, Mike, 16 Goldman, Emma, 105, 143–144n Graham, Agnes, 48 Grosse, Edmund, 103 Hall, Stuart, 8–10, 14, 28, 63, 83, 107, 122, 136, 145–146n Harding,Thomas, 129 “Hard Times” (McKay), 3 Harlem: cultural activity in, 12; diaspora, 10–13; and modernism, 12; as race capital, 16 “Harlem Dancer” (McKay), 4, 11, 132 Harlem Renaissance, 99; definition of, 16; McKay as voice of, 4; McKay’s notoriety in, 17–18

201

Harlem Shadows (McKay), 109, 126, 130–131 Harris, Frank, 12, 20–21, 44, 69 Henley,William Ernest, 136 Heretics (society), 100, 110 “Hermit,The” (McKay), 66–67 Hill, James, 58 homosexuality, 55–56, 70, 118, 120, 150n; in Jamaica, 53 horticulture: changes in Victorian formalism, 76–79; city expansion and, 85–86; colonialism and, 49–50; disorder and unity in, 93–94; garden designers, 169n; Gertrude Jekyll’s interest in, 74; impact on McKay, 60–64, 66; lavish garden design, 77; moral imperative in, 95; naturalized gardens, 85–86; pastoral poetry and, 81–85; plant diversity, 77–78, 87; poetic aspect of, 86–87; poetry and music and, 78–79; popular, 7 Hughes, Langston, 16, 17 humanity, nature as model for, 95–96 Hungarian Revolution, 144n ideas, dance and, 116–117 identity, aesthetics and, 5–6 ideology, 21, 92, 154–155n; diaspora and, 168n; internationalism and, 140; language and, 102–103 “If We Must Die” (McKay), 4, 20, 60, 106, 111 imperialism, 31–32; and Jamaica nostalgia, 46–47; language and, 102–103 Independent Socialist Party, 36 Industrial Revolution, 24–25 International Club and Institute, 108 International Council of Women, 140 internationalism, 13–14, 24, 139; ideology and, 140; internationalist agitation, 141–142; New Internationalism, 147n; as parallel country, 142; vanguardism and, 185n; and war “preparedness,” 185n

202

Index

“Intrenched Classes,The” (McKay), 38–39 “I Shall Return” (McKay), 8 Jackman, Harold, 15 Jamaica: annancy in, 53–55; demilitarizing of, 37; homosexuality in, 53; as horticultural laboratory, 78; labor unrest in, 32–34; land issues in, 35–36; nostalgia for, 46–47; Olivier’s reforms in, 41–42 Jamaican Song and Story (W. Jekyll), 54, 55 jammas, 47, 52 Jazz Age, 4 Jekyll, Agnes, 78, 87–88 Jekyll, Caroline, 52 Jekyll, Gertrude, 7, 13, 47, 52, 64, 79, 83, 84, 91, 122; aesthetic expression, 94–95; Arts and Crafts movement involvement of, 93; bioregional aesthetic, 72–73; collaboration with Bodichon, 93–94; collaboration with Ruskin, 95–96; edits Garden, 85; interest in folkways, 73–74; and modernism, 98; as nonconformist, 86; travel in colonies, 94 Jekyll, Herbert, 48–51 Jekyll,Walter, 13, 42, 43–45, 46, 61, 62, 64, 69, 86, 116, 117, 120, 122, 131, 138; affinity for Jamaica, 48–51; and annancy, 53–55; countryside aesthetics of, 51–52; early family life, 52–53; homosexuality, 53, 55–56; McKay’s visits with, 3, 47, 66–67; mentors McKay, 52; relationship with Olivier, 44 Jekyll family, 74 Johnson, James Weldon, 135 Jones, Owen, 94 Joyce, James, 102 “Joy in the Woods” (McKay), 119 Kansas State College, 3 Kincaid, Jamaica, 62, 63 “King Banana” (McKay), 39, 40

Kipling, Rudyard, 8, 16, 70, 109 Knopf, Alfred, 127 “Labourer’s Life Give Me, A” (McKay), 81–83 “Labour” poems (McKay), 118–119 land: colonialism’s impact on, 38; sustainability, 39–40 land issues, in Jamaica, 35–36 Land Reform Union, 5, 25 language: as appropriation and reappropriation, 107; Basic English theory, 101, 102–103; deemotionalizing of, 177n; global English, 171n; insular and Eurocentric nature of English, 102–103; in opposition to modernism, 102; as sign situation, 100–101; social responsibility of, 101–104 “La Paloma in London” (McKay), 113 Lenin, V. I., 133 liberal democracy, 187n Liberator magazine, 11, 99, 106 Liebknecht, Karl, 144n “Lies” (Gibson), 130 “Like a Strong Tree” (McKay), 91–92 linguistic theory,“word magic” as, 101, 103, 111 “Little Peoples,The” (McKay), 106 Locke, Alain, 11–12, 13, 15, 16, 43, 130, 133, 135 Lost Generation, 11 Luxemburg, Rosa, 133, 144n “Lynching,The” (McKay), 109, 110–111 MacDermot,Thomas, 47, 64, 89–90 McIntosh, Charles, 77 McKay, Claude: alienation themes, 129; and annancy, 55; antimodernism sentiment, 92; antiracism work, 175n; in Berlin, 133; Burns’s persona embraced by, 56–58; cartography of resistance, 9; Catholicism, 17, 151–152n, 152–153n; and class and race, 107–108; early travels, 4; Eastman’s view of, 127; education in United States, 3–4;

Index

embraces Fabianism, 36; European influences, 114–116; folk wisdom in poems of, 79; in France, 151n; gardening poems, 77; in The Hague, 117–120; and Harlem diaspora, 10–13; Harlem Renaissance notoriety of, 17–18; health problems, 183–184n; history shapes poems of, 74–76; homosexuality, 55–56, 70, 150n; and horticulture, 60–64, 66; insights from art, 121–122; internationalism, 13–14; Jekyll mentors, 52; in Kingston, 68; as late Victorian, 6; in London radical milieu, 108–109; lyrical image in, 131; in Marseilles, 136–137; master of disguises, 69; meets with Jekyll, 3, 47, 66–67; in Morocco, 137–138; need for place in poems of, 96–98; as “Negro poet,” 21; Ogden’s eccentricities affecting, 113–114; pastoral aesthetic, 5–6; pastoral nature of poems, 81–85; perceived as threatening, 16–17; poetic hybridity, 9, 87–88; poetic linkages, 10; poetic mentoring, 24; political editorial choices of, 110–111; political notoriety, 183n; and popular horticulture, 7; postcolonial paradigm, 131–132; race depiction, 127–128; racialized self, 135–136; relationship with Ogden, 100–109; rivalry with MacDermot, 89–90;“sex-passion” sonnets, 117–118; summoned by congressional committee, 150–151n; travels to England, 99–100; use of dialect, 58, 60, 114; and utopian illusion, 23; verse as articulation, 9–10; view of peasantry, 81–83; visits Soviet Union, 132–133; as voice of Harlem Renaissance, 4 McKay, Uriah Theodore, 58, 68 Marx, Karl, 24, 25 Marxism, 26, 31, 36, 92 materialism, 95 Maugham,W. Somerset, 8 “Me Bannabees” (McKay), 79–80 Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, 42

203

Messenger magazine, 99 Mill, John Stuart, 14, 24 Millay, Edna St.Vincent, 132 Milton, John, 21 modernism, 92, 98, 107; Harlem and, 12; language in opposition to, 102; and representation, fiction and language, 172n moral imperative, in gardening, 95 “Morning Joy” (McKay), 112 Morris, May, 93 Morris,William, 13, 14, 24, 76, 85, 91, 92, 93, 95 movement, poetics of, 14–15 “Mulatto” (McKay), 29 music, poetry and rhythm of, 120–121 My Green Hills of Jamaica (McKay), 58 “My Mountain Home” (McKay), 96, 126 “My Native Land, My Home” (McKay), 83–84 Myth of Governor Eyre,The (S. Olivier), 42 nationalism, 108 nature: destruction of, 107; as model for new humanity, 95–96 “Negro Art and the Racial Mountain, The” (Hughes), 16 Negroes in America,The (McKay), 133 “Negroid Africa,” 23 New Critics, 107 “New Forces” (McKay), 32 New Negro (magazine), 13 New Negro for a New Century (Washington), 15 New Theology, 57 “Niggers and Night Riders” (M. Eastman), 127 1917 (club), 104 “no-land-race,” 83–84 North, Michael, 54 North of Boston (Frost), 105 Ogden, C. K., 13, 14, 52, 56, 94, 99; eccentricities, 113–114; homosexuality, 118; McKay’s English relationship

204

Index

Ogden (continued ) with, 100–109; and McKay’s insights from art, 121–122; political editorial choices of, 110–111; rebels against academia, 109–110 “Old Ploughman’s Song, The” (folk song), 74–76, 81 Old West Surrey: Some Notes and Memories (G. Jekyll), 72–73 Olivier, Margaret, 41 Olivier, Sydney, 3, 13, 23, 24, 46, 48, 53, 56, 61, 71, 78, 81, 83, 89, 92, 94, 107, 111, 118, 120, 136; ancestry, 39; and banana cultivation, 40; and Caribbean poetry, 44–45; and colonial discontent, 30–31; and colonialism, 37; and development of Fabianism, 24–25; identity with Africa, 29; Jamaican home of, 43; and Jamaican labor unrest, 32–34; and land issues, 35–36; as naturalist, 40–41; and racial identity, 30; reforms as governor, 41–42; relationship with Jekyll, 44; and self-rule, 37–38; socialism of, 45; socialist vision of, 32–35; on working class, 26–27 Opportunity magazine, 13 Orientalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Cannadine), 46 Orwell, George, 8 pacifism, 13–14, 139–140, 171n Pankhurst, Richard Marsden, 42 Pankhurst, Sylvia, 99, 105, 108, 122, 123, 133 “Pariahs” (McKay), 111 “Park in Spring,The” (McKay), 129 “Passive Resistance” (McKay), 33–34 pastoral aesthetic, 5–6 pastoral poetry, 144n; of McKay, 81–85 Pearson’s magazine, 11 peasantry: McKay’s view of, 81; uprising, 161n “persona” poems, 58 Pitts, Helen, 140 place, need for, 96–98

plants. See horticulture poetic hybridity, 9 poetics of movement, 14–15 poetry, and social reform, 103 Poetry of the Negro (Hughes), 17 Poinsett, Joel, 61 poinsettia plant, 61–62, 65–66 popular horticulture, 7. See also horticulture Pound, Ezra, 92, 105 Powers, Eileen, 110 Pratt, Mary Louise, 10 Progress and Poverty (George), 35 propaganda, 101, 150n, 177n; art as, 16 “Quashie to Buccra” (McKay), 54 race: class and, 107–108; Ezerman’s objections concerning, 120; McKay’s and Ogden’s editorial choices regarding, 110–111; McKay’s antiracism work, 175n; poetic depiction, 127–128; racial unrest, 143–144n; sex and, 149n; social rank vs., 145n; vanguardism and, 185n race capital, Harlem as, 16 race chauvinism, 27–28 racial identity, diversity and, 30 racialized self, 135–136 rationalism, 57 “Rest in Peace” (McKay), 111, 124–125 Rhodes, Cecil, 37 Richards, Grant, 118 Richards, I. A., 14, 100, 122 Riding, Laura, 92 “Right Turn to Catholicism” (McKay), 151–152n Robinson,William, 76–77, 83, 85 “Roman Holiday, A” (McKay), 106 Rorty, James, 127 Rorty, John, 16 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 93 Ruskin, John, 76, 85, 93, 95–96 Said, Edward, 21 Schomburg, Arthur, 133

Index

Selected Poems (McKay), 20 Seven Arts magazine, 4, 11, 99 sex, race and, 149n Shaw, George Bernard, 16, 20, 24, 25, 27, 44, 109 shay-shays, 52 Shelley, Percy, 10, 128 sign situation, language as, 100–101 Socialism: and class warfare, 24–25, 26; Olivier and, 26; Olivier’s vision of, 32–35, 45 “Solitary Reaper,The” (W.Wordsworth), 83 Songs of Jamaica (McKay), 3, 18, 42, 44, 54, 56, 59, 64, 68, 69, 79 South African Charter Company, 37 South African War, 49 Soviet Union, McKay’s visit to, 132–133 “Spanish Needle” (McKay), 62–63, 109 Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (McKay), 52, 65, 104, 109, 118, 122, 126 Stevenson,W. A., 68 sugar oligarchy, 38, 39–40, 160n “Sukee River” (McKay), 20, 63, 114–116 Survey Graphic, 12 symbolism, 101–104 symbols, and language as sign situation, 100–101 Syncopated Orchestra, 120 Taggard, Geneviere, 21 Tales Told of Shem and Shaun ( Joyce), 102 Third International, 17, 132–133 Tillery,Tyrone, 16, 18 “To O.E.A.” (McKay), 112–113 Toomer, Jean, 50–51 “To Work” (McKay), 126, 128 “Travail” (McKay), 118–119, 139 “Tropics in New York” (McKay), 63, 109, 118 Trotsky, Leon, 133

205

Tuskegee Institute, 3 Untermeyer, Louis, 129–130 utopian illusion, 23 vanguardism, 185n vegetarianism, 43–45 Victorian Age, 162n; as “condition of crisis,” 144–145n; McKay’s roots in, 6 Victorian formalism, 76–79 “Void,The” (McKay), 136 Walrond, Eric, 22 Washington, Booker T., 15, 116, 140, 141 Watson, Forbes, 78, 79 Watts (tutor), 58 Webb, Beatrice, 13, 26, 93 Webb, Sidney, 13, 25, 30, 31 Welby,Victoria, 101, 111 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 13, 140 Wheatley, Phillis, 125 “When Dawn Comes to the City” (McKay), 126 “White Fiends” (McKay), 111 Wilde, Oscar, 6, 53 Wild Garden (Robinson), 76 Williams, Raymond, 4, 8, 10, 18, 20, 130, 144n Wilson, George F., 77 women, 140, 182nn; discrimination against, 93; in Heretics society, 110; and workplace, 159n Women’s Peace Party, 142 Wood, James, 100, 106, 107 Woolf, Virginia, 109 word magic theory, 101, 103, 111 Wordsworth, Mary, 79 Workers’ Dreadnought (newspaper), 105 working class, Olivier on, 26–27 Working Men’s Guild, 93 “Writing on the Wall,The” (McKay), 110 Yeats,William Butler, 5, 20, 24, 130

About the Author

Josh Gosciak received his doctorate from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the editor of the anthology A Day in the Life: Tales from the Lower East Side–An Anthology of Writings from the Lower East, 1940–1990; and is the founder and publisher of Contact II, a multicultural poetry journal. He teaches literature and media studies.