Claude McKay's last (and least) novel (Black History Month review)
Written: Feb 04 '05 (Updated Feb 04 '05)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: the interlude in a paternalistic New Deal program, exposures of various hypocricies
Cons: Glory Soul rigamarole, listless plot; although short, the book is easy to put down
The Bottom Line: Listless, episodic novelization of some phenomena of Harlem from the 1920s and 30s
|
|
|
| Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Claude McKay - Harlem Glory: A Fragment of Aframer... |
Claude McKay (1890-1948) was a marginal figure in the Harlem Renaissance in part because he was a decade and a half older than other participants, in part because he began in Jamaica rather than the Southern United State, and in part because he was in France during the heyday (1925-29) of the Renaissance. In other ways, he fit in. These include having sexual relationships with other men (in McKay's case, older white patrons in particular) and writing about lower-class characters considered unsavory by the black bourgeoisie and the Negro leaders who wanted only positive images of success and respectability written about.
McKay grew up the youngest of eleven children in a stable (literate, land-owning, and intact) rural family in Jamaica. Much indulged as a youngest child, his talent as a poet began to be recognized while he was still in grade school. He was encouraged to write in dialect by an expatriate homosexual Englishman named Walter Jekyll, who became his mentor, sponsored publication of two volumes of Jamaican ballads, and financed McKay's move to the United States in 1912. Not to Harlem, but to Booker T. Washington's Tuskeegee. McKay left there, but not agrarian studies, this time in Kansas. Like Thurman and poet Countee Cullen, McKay married briefly. Unlike them, he sired a son, though he never met him. Before moving to Harlem in 1914, McKay briefly had many jobs, a number of them for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
McKay began US publishing in 1917 and became a protégé of the socialist Max Eastman, who was editor of The Liberator. McKay's most famous poem, "If We Must Die," was published in The Liberator in 1919, a time of postwar lynchings aimed to terrorize blacks back into their pre-World War I place in the South. Harlem lost the thrill and glamour that had enthralled him when he first arrived, but the collection of poems that made him famous beyond socialist circles was entitled Harlem Shadows (published by Harcourt Brace and Company in 1922), though it included nostalgic poems about Jamaica as well as riffs on Harlem life.
McKay shipped out of Harlem in 1922, before some other Harlem Renaissance writers arrived there, and did not return until 1934, by which time the most accomplished Harlem Renaissance fiction writers (Rudolph Fisher and Wallace Thurman) were dead. His initial destination was the Third Communist Internationale in Moscow, but the American delegation not only refused to include him, but sought to have him expelled from the Soviet Union. After his negative experiences with American communists in the USSR, McKay drifted around France and Germany, hanging out with sailors and their fans in Marseilles and undertaking occasional odd jobs.
McKay continued to be encouraged by James Weldon Johnson, who had helped finance his Atlantic crossing. W. E. B. Du Bois's antagonism to McKay increased with the 1928 publication of McKay's novel about Harlem "low-lifes," Home to Harlem. Du Bois saw McKay as another sensationalizer of the unsavory aspects of proletarian and lumpen-proletarian Harlem, "the debauched tenth, instead of celebrating the professional accomplishments of "the Talented Tenth," the job Du Bois wanted writers to undertake, but which Thurman and his associates refused to undertake. (Sound at all like the Cosby show vs. rap?) Home to Harlem became the first novel by a black author to make best-seller lists.
McKay followed up Home to Harlem with novels primarily featuring black workers, seamen (, and layabouts) in Marseilles. McKay returned to Harlem in 1934. The effervescence of the jazz age was gone, and the Depression was particularly crushing in Harlem. McKay quickly returned to poverty (not that he had ever been very far removed from it), but continued to write. His autobiography A Long Way From Home was published in 1937, followed by a collection of essays on Harlem: Negro Metropolis that included one on the Father Divine cult, one on Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement (see Thurman's "Jeremiah the Magnificent"), one on the numbers racket, and criticism of racism within American socialist sects, including the U.S. Communist and the Socialist parties. The book offended many and had no champions.
Simultaneous with writing the nonfiction about Harlem, McKay was mining some of the same materials into the episodic/picaresque novel (or novel fragment) Harlem Glory (which was not published until 1990). Its protagonist, Buster South, experienced the bootleg speakeasy era, then (like McKay) went to France (as the kept man of a black gangster's widow, who had helped accumulate a fortune in the numbers racket). In Paris, American Negroes had a vogue, but when the money ran out (in the bank collapses of 1929), Buster returned to Harlem—like McKay. And, like McKay, Buster had a difficult time finding his feet in the depressed and Depression Harlem.
He finds another patroness (McKay's succession of male patrons are transformed—fairly convincingly—into females in Harlem Glory), a cook named Oleander. Dried out, he enrolls in the Civilian Conservation Corps and is shipped upstate to Camp Newfields, a large (a thousand-worker) public-works project. He has problems with the paternalistic white overlords of the CCC camp. When some of the workers attempt to organize (unionizing against a New Deal program...), they are accused of being communist troublemakers and banished. When Buster speaks up to deny that his banished friends were communists (they appear to be IWW "Wobblies," like the organizer in John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, he was transferred and decided to drop out of the CCC and return to Harlem.
Oleander has fallen under the sway of the Glory Savior (a thinly fictionalized rendition of Father Divine). Buster is taken on by the Glory Soul cult and the rich white woman who has become the Glory Queen in the cult (one which does not permit its personnel—other than the Glory Savior himself—any sexual relations) is smitten by Buster, with predictably catastrophic effects for him.
Vying with Glory Savior and the many Christian congregations in Harlem is a convert to Islam called Omar who heads a movement calling itself the Yeomen of Labor. This is not modeled on the Nation of Islam ("black Muslims"), but on a Harlem organizer who took the name of Sufi Abdul Hamid, who organized boycotts of businesses in Harlem that refused to hire blacks as sales clerks.
Although a high-ranking member of the Glory Savior organization, Buster is persuaded by a friend from Newfields to picket a 125th Street emporium. An Egyptian Arab who was a mainstay of the Yeomen of Labor is killed in scuffling. Omar is arrested for disturbing the peace. And the store owner smirks.
The novel ends or breaks off with the erotic advances of the Glory Queen being witnessed and misinterpreted by Oleander (now "Glory Chastity").
The entire novel—or novel fragment— fills only 103 pages of text. I found it very easy to put down, and it took me more than a month to finish. I found the Camp Newfields interlude and the anger at the refusal of various leftist factions to champion the Harlem downtrodden the most interesting. The Glory Soul involvements I found yawn-inducing and the information about bootleg "hooch" familiar (did I live through Prohibition in a former life?). The parts on the structure of the numbers "banks," the Paris vogue of the expatriates, and on the Yeomen of Labor boycotts are intermediate in interest. The plotting is contrived and the language (both McKay's prose and the dialogue he assigns his character) is not particularly notable.
I prefer the Harlems written about by Wallace Thurman and Rudolph Fisher (earlier), Chester Himes and James Baldwin (later). For disillusion with white leftists ever-ready to sacrifice the interests of black workers to the white "universal class," Richard Wright's underappreciated The Outsider (and Wright's even more autobiographical contribution to The God That Failed) and Ralph Ellison's much-lauded Invisible Man are deeper and more insightful, with more engaging protagonists than McKay's Buster.
Recommended:
No
|
|
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.