The nomadic Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay probably never dreamed that 21stcentury readers would delve into his private correspondence some 77 years after his death. But that’s probably part of the occupational hazard (luck?) of being a literary standout, or, as Yale University Press describes him, “one of the clearest and most radical voices of the Harlem Renaissance.”
The press recently announced this Letters in Exile: Transnational Travels of a Harlem Renaissance Writeredited by Brooks E. Hefner and Gary Edward Holcomb.
This is a comprehensive collection of “never-before-published dispatches from the road” featuring correspondents who have also become cultural icons: Langston Hughes, WEB Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Pauline Nardal, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, Max Eastman, and a host of other writers, editors, activists, and benefactors. The letters cover the years 1916 to 1934 and were written from different cities, as McKay traveled extensively.
His daughter Ruth Hope McKay, who apparently never met the writer in his life (perhaps because the British authorities at the time prevented him from returning to Jamaica), sold and donated his papers to Yale University from 1964 onwards.
The papers also include his letters to her, shedding light on this “unique figure of displacement, this critically productive internationalist, this black Atlantic wanderer,” as one French translator called him. But reading someone else’s correspondence, even that of a long-dead writer, can feel like an intrusion. It’s a sensation that some readers will have to overcome.
Born in 1890 (or 1889) in Clarendon, Jamaica, McKay left the Caribbean island for the United States in 1912, and his wanderings would later take him to Russia, England, France and Morocco, among other places.
His critically acclaimed work includes the poem “If We Must Die” (written in response to racist violence in the United States against people of African descent in mid-1919), the poetry collections Numbers from Jamaica And Shadows of Haarlemand the novels Homeport of Haarlem, BanjoAnd Banana bottom.
Years after his death in 1948, scholars discovered manuscripts that would be published posthumously: Amiable with big teeth (written in 1941 and published in 2017) and Romance in Marseille (written in 1933 and published in 2020). McKay also wrote a memoir titled A long way from home (1937).
Though considered a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, McKay was a cosmopolitan intellectual—an author ahead of his time who wrote about race, inequality, the legacy of slavery, queerness, and a range of other topics.
He wrote in a sharp, striking, often ironic or satirical manner Letters in exile reflects the same qualities. The collection “reveals McKay gossiping, cajoling and confiding as he engages in spirited debates and challenges the political and artistic questions of the day,” the editors said.
Some of the most interesting letters are about France, the setting of a significant part of McKay’s oeuvre and a place where his literary status has risen in the past decade, through a stream of new translations, colloquia and even a film dedicated to his life: Claude McKay, from Harlem to Marseille (or in French, Claude McKay, from Harlem to Marseille), directed by Matthieu Verdeil and released in 2021.
McKay was the “first twentieth-century black author associated with the United States to be widely celebrated in France,” editors Hefner and Holcomb write in their introduction. They say the letters show that France shaped McKay’s worldview, and that he saw himself as both a Francophile and eternal. stranger.
Through the selected correspondence, we see how McKay experiences France in different ways: coping with winter underdressed, participating in the community of multi-ethnic outsiders in Marseille, standing shoulder to shoulder with different personalities during the Roaring Twentiesor observing French colonialism in Morocco. And almost always short of money.
In January 1924 in Paris, after a bout of illness, he wrote to New York-based social worker and activist Grace Campbell that he had had the “hardest holiday” of his life: “I was sick with the flu for ten days and did not force myself to get up until New Year’s Day. I am suffering because I am not properly dressed to get through the winter. I wonder if anything can be done there to raise some money to get through these bad times.”
A month later he wrote to another correspondent that the “cold wave” numbed his fingers and that he had to sleep with his “old overcoat” against his skin, still unable to keep warm. He also found the “French commercial class” “terrible,” complaining that “they cheat me when I come and come.”
During his early stay in France he called Marseille a “nasty, disgusting city”. But a few years later, McKay wrote to teacher and arts patron Harold Jackman in 1927: “I am working on a book about Marseilles. It is a cool, picturesque old city and I would like to show it to you someday.”
In addition to references to his work, McKay discussed global events in his correspondence, expressed his opinions, and described relationships. His letters, say Hefner and Holcomb, are at least “an essential companion to his most revolutionary writings, from the groundbreaking poetry he produced after leaving Jamaica, through his groundbreaking novels and short fiction, to his extraordinary memoirs and journalism.”
While this may be true, and as illuminating as the correspondence proves, many readers will still have to reckon with the uncomfortable feeling of being a literary voyeur. – AM/SWAN
© Inter Press Service (20260113144017) — All rights reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service
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