No Renaissance Without Return

I read Claude McKay's "Home to Harlem"

Creatures, have you dug the spill/Of Sugar Hill? I’ve gone home to Washington, DC for a little while—where the houses have lawn signs proclaiming DC “The Chocolate City,” a conservatism that is the surest sign that something has been irretrievably lost. I’m sitting here on the back porch, in the gathering humid heat of the day, in the tidal song of the cicadas, as close to my hometown as I can get without a time machine, and not quite close enough. And I’ve been reading Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem.

I’m reading McKay because he’ll be the fourth subject of those BCF biographical worksheets: educational guides, intended for CCD (catechism class) but adaptable for ELA or Religion classes, telling the stories of historical figures who experienced same-sex desire and found peace in Catholic faith. So I started with McKay’s biography, and excerpts of the poetry; the biography intrigued me more than the poetry. McKay is elusive. His life was shaped by friendship, but he found friends difficult to trust. He had a polemical soul, that Enjolras passion for the cause of right; he came to the Church as a haven from ideology and yet still wrote polemics in Her favor. His gravestone hints at his appeal: PEACE, O MY REBEL HEART.

Home to Harlem is his first novel. It’s in three parts—homecoming after World War I; railroad work; home again. By the time I finished the railroad section, I was thinking, Holy smokes, this guy is phenomenal. I would put this beside Their Eyes Were Watching God and for my money this might be better. Then the third section is unfocused and fairly bland. There’s a kind of writer whose reputation never reaches the heights it deserves because they wrote too much—too much digging required to uncover the ruby glints. Dunstan Thompson, another subject of our worksheets, is one of these; his best work is extraordinary, just a heart-stirring interweaving of craft and passion, emotion and reflection and knowledge of human hearts, but there is a lot of merely-okay work padding it out. (This is a good starting place for Thompson, especially for Christian readers who will appreciate the attention to his later, beautifully tender devotional poetry.)

Well, but so, what is Home to Harlem when it’s good? It’s intensely sensual. Hot stuff! He has a great ear for the unexpected verb—it always feels like a discovery, like the weird verb jumped into his mouth as he was telling the tale, not like a mannered literary device or a tic. The book has a pulse, and it throbs with the love of people, especially Black people, the rhythm of working-class and underclass life, the sweat and sweetness of lives that could be depicted with righteous anger but instead are shot through with a lightning joy. Like here, come on:

When you were fed up with the veneer of Seventh Avenue, and Goldgraben’s Afro-Oriental garishness, you would go to the Congo and turn rioting loose in all the tenacious odors of service and the warm indigenous smells of Harlem, fooping or jig-jagging the night away. You would if you were a black kid hunting for joy in New York.

Or:

Hell was playing in the hot square hole of a pantry and the coffin-shaped kitchen of the dining-car. The short, stout, hard-and-horny chef was as terrible as a rhinoceros. Against the second, third, and fourth cooks he bellied his way up to the little serving door and glared at the waiters. His tough, aproned front was a challenge to them. In his oily, shining face his big white eyes danced with meanness. All the waiters had squeezed into the pantry at once, excitedly snatching, dropping and breaking things.

There’s just an exhilaration in this writing. There’s a noir edge, you could say, that Chandlerish lyricism of fear and suspicion, as in this scene of cocaine use:

The light-yellow came back with a cold gleam in his eyes, like arsenic shining in the dark. His features were accentuated by a rigid, disturbing tone and he resembled a smiling wax figure.

If there’s a central element to this picaresque novel, it’s the contrast between Jake and Ray. Jake is our protagonist, a hard-living American man who wanders the city seeking the sweet girl he met on his first night home in Harlem. Ray is a Caribbean intellectual, like our author. He’s diffident, he doesn’t do coke (usually), he thinks and doubts—but he, too, is a creature, his hidden blood running hot.

Life burned in Ray perhaps more intensely than in Jake. Ray felt more and his range was wider and he could not be satisfied with the easy, simple things that sufficed for Jake. Sometimes he felt like a tree with roots in the soil and sap flowing out and whispering leaves drinking in the air. But he drank in more of life than he could distill into active animal living. Maybe that was why he felt he had to write.

Their friendship is the unexpected plot element of this novel whose plot isn’t that important. Its superfluity suggests that it was important to McKay. Black men’s friendships are one of his great themes, or so I’m told, and I’m looking forward to his next novel, Banjo, which I think also revolves around such a friendship. Home to Harlem, at its best, is a feverish book about two men whose haphazard lives don’t reveal their great capacity for love and thought.

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Elsewhere

“Photos of Catholics in Paraguay wear[ing] feathered costumes to celebrate Saint Francis Solano.” Via the Pillar.

Photo of Claude McKay via Picryl and used under a Creative Commons license.