Your 'The Park in Spring' sonnet is a remarkable achievement. I read it to a very refined woman and she could not hold back her tears. It takes me back to the humanists of the eighteenth century, touching me like Hood or even something of Wordsworth's. I saw them at close range, you know, in West Africa and the Sudan. They have plenty of the instinct of the senses, much of which we have 1ost.
Life is cheap in Africa. . .
I kept silent. Harris was against the treatment of black people as inferiors but he unthinkingly attempted to read McKay's character in terms of his race. Harris' blunt probings into his origins that most repelled McKay at their meeting, but his tedious wittering about Jesus. One strong piece of evidence for the view of Harris as racist is the apparent anti-Semitism displayed in stories such as Mr. Jacob's Philosophy . Tobin and Gertz devoted several pages to a discussion of this matter, arriving at the conclusion that Harris had been guilty of a 'fashionable' anti-Semitism before about 1920 or thereabouts, but age had mellowed him.