HOME AT LAST
Goldweber, David
HONE AT LAST The pilgrimage of Claude McKay David Goldweber There have been a good number of conversions of twentieth-century intellectuals to Catholicism, but few are as intriguing as the...
...With the publication of his Harlem Shadows, a volume of poetry in 1921, McKay became known as the most fiery and vociferous black poet of the day...
...The poem "Baptism" invoked Christianity in order to distort it, telling of an imagined antibaptism in which McKay saw himself baptized by the fires of white racism to become an avenging warrior...
...David Goldweber teaches English in the San Francisco Bay Area...
...Along with Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, McKay is considered one of the great poets of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s...
...For a brief time in the early 1930s, realizing he believed in God but not yet feeling ready for Christianity, McKay studied Islam, but was uncomfortCommonweal I I September 10,1999...
...Never a man to compromise, McKay became furious when an editor toned down his sonnet "The White House" by renaming it "White Houses" (and thereby blunting its political bite) for its inclusion in the Survey Graphic literature anthology of 1924...
...A man of contradictions, involved by turns with atheism, homosexuality, Islam, Soviet communism, and Marcus Garvey's Black Nationalist movement, McKay at last found that for him only Roman Catholicism offered peace, order, wonder, and truth...
...Bow down in worship, humble and alone, / Bow lowly down before the sacred sight / Of man's divinity alive in stone...
...He is currently working on a study of the Harlem Renaissance in relation to European Romanticism...
...Through the early 1920s, McKay continued to see Christianity only as a tool of oppressive white capitalists...
...The editor, Alain Locke, was among the best known and most powerful figures of the black literary scene, but this did not stop McKay from writing an angry letter of protest threatening to become Locke's "intellectual enemy for all time" if such an event occurred again...
...The seeds of McKay's attraction to Christianity began in the late 1920s after he became aware of the beauty of the great European cathedrals, especially the Catholic ones in Spain...
...In Harlem he contributed articles to Garvey's Negro World and had a brief passion for men...
...In 1925, McKay extolled not Lenin's tomb in Moscow but Saint Isaac's Church in Petro-grad...
...The poem "Enslaved" blamed what McKay called the "Christian West" for ravaging the "Black Land" of Africa...
...In Harlem Shadows, McKay showed belligerence, sorrow, hatred for Western civilization, and rage against Christianity...
...His work lacked the jazzy inventiveness of Hughes and the stately craftsmanship of Cullen, but it compensated through the sheer force of its honesty and bluntness...
...This poem was followed in the Harlem Shadows volume by the sonnet "If We Must Die"—McKay's most famous poem—which imagined a war between blacks and whites, the whites "mad and hungry dogs" and even "monsters" whose injustices are to be met with violence...
...At this same time he found himself disappointed with communism, which he increasingly found to be close-minded, partisan, and cold...
...What jeweled glory fills my spirit's eye," he wrote, "What golden grandeur moves the depths of me...
...HONE AT LAST The pilgrimage of Claude McKay David Goldweber There have been a good number of conversions of twentieth-century intellectuals to Catholicism, but few are as intriguing as the conversion of the poet, novelist, and critic Claude McKay...
...Born in Jamaica in 1890, McKay moved to Harlem in 1915 to join the burgeoning literary scene...
...He seemed steadfast and resolute in his beliefs, intending never to return to the United States until it had overthrown its capitalist order...
...He became involved with the Communist party, left the United States, and spent time in Europe, North Africa, and Soviet Russia...
...He could not shake the sense of something transcendent working in and through human life...
...But then McKay began to change...
Vol. 126 • September 1999 • No. 15
