A long way from home

by Claude McKay

Had I been a black Diogenes exploring the white world with my African lamp, I could have proclaimed: I saw Bernard Shaw! Otherwise I did not get a grand thrill out of London. And I felt entirely out of sympathy with the English environment. There was the climate, of course, which nobody likes. In my young poetic exuberance in the clean green high hills of Jamaica, I had chanted blithely and naïvely of "chimney factories pouring smoke."

But after working in a factory in New York and getting well acquainted with the heat and smoke of railroad kitchens and engines, I was no longer romantic about factory smoke. And London was enveloped in smoke most of the time. When I was a boy in the tropics I always rejoiced in the periodic fogs which rose up out of the rivers like grand masses of fine fleecy clouds coming out of the belly of the earth and ascending to the sky. But the fog of London was like a heavy suffocating shroud. It not only wrapped you around but entered into your throat like a strangling nightmare. Yet the feeling of London was so harshly unfriendly to me that sometimes I was happy in the embrace of the enfolding fog. London was the only great northern city in which I was obliged to wear an overcoat all the year round.

However, it was more than the climate that made London uncongenial. I lived for months in Brittany and it rained all the time, unceasingly. Yet I loved the environment, because the Bretons were such a sympathetic people. Like the quiet brown fields and the rugged coasts, even like the unending fishermen's nets everywhere, the unceasing rain was a charming part of the whole harmony of their way of living. But the English as a whole were a strangely unsympathetic people, as coldly chilling as their English fog.

I don't think I could have survived the ordeal of more than a year's residence in London if I had not had the freedom of two clubs. The membership of both clubs was overwhelmingly foreign. And perhaps that was why I felt most of the time that I was living on foreign instead of English soil.

One club was for colored soldiers. It was situated in a basement in Drury Lane. There was a host of colored soldiers in London, from the West Indies and Africa, with a few colored Americans, East Indians, and Egyptians among them. A West Indian student from Oxford introduced me to the club. I went often and listened to the soldiers telling tales of their war experiences in France, Egypt, and Arabia. Many were interested in what American Negroes were thinking and writing. And so I brought to the club copies of American Negro magazines and newspapers: The Crisis, The Messenger, The Negro World, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender. A soldier from Jamaica invited me on a holiday trip to the camp at Winchester.

I wrote a series of articles about the colored soldiers and their club, which Hubert Harrison featured in the Negro World, the organ of the Garvey Back-to-Africa Movement. In due time the Negro World with the first article arrived at the Drury Lane club. The Englishwoman in charge of the club took exception to the article. I think she was the widow of a sergeant major who had served England in India. She had given me an interview, telling about her "colored boys" and their virtues, if white people knew how to manage them. And I had quoted her and said she had a patronizing white maternal attitude toward her colored charges. The Englishwoman did not like that. And so, being persona non grata, I transferred most of my attention to the other club.

The International Club was full of excitement, with its dogmatists and doctrinaires of radical left ideas: Socialists, Communists, anarchists, syndicalists, one-big-unionists and trade unionists, soap-boxers, poetasters, scribblers, editors of little radical sheets which flourish in London. But foreigners formed the majority of the membership. The Jewish element was the largest. The Polish Jews and the Russian Jews were always intellectually at odds. The German Jews were aloof. There were also Czechs, Italians, and Irish nationalists, and rumors of spies.

For the first time I found myself in an atmosphere of doctrinaire and dogmatic ideas in which people devoted themselves entirely to the discussion and analysis of social events from a radical and Marxian point of view. There was an uncompromising earnestness and seriousness about those radicals that reminded me of an orthodox group of persons engaged in the discussion of a theological creed. Only at the International Club I was not alienated by the radicals as I would have been by the theologians. The contact stimulated and broadened my social outlook and plunged me into the reading of Karl Marx.

There was so much emphasis placed upon Marxian intellects and un-Marxian minds, the Marxian and non-Marxian way of approach to social organization, that I felt intellectually inadequate and decided to educate myself. One thing seemed very clear to me: the world was in the beginning of passing through a great social change, and I was excited by the possibilities. These people believed that Marx was the true prophet of the new social order. Suppose they were not wrong! And if not altogether right, suppose they were nearly right? History had taught me that the face of the world had been changed before by an obscure prophet. I had no reason to think that the world I lived in was permanent, solid and unshakable: the World War had just come to a truce.

So I started reading Marx. But it wasn't entertaining reading. Much of it was like studying subjects you dislike, which are necessary to pass an examination. However, I got the essential stuff. And a Marx emerged from his pages different from my former idea of him as a torch-burning prophet of social revolution. I saw the picture of a man imprisoned by walls upon walls of books and passionately studying the history and philosophy and science of the world, so that he might outline a new social system for the world. I thought that Marx belonged even more to the institutions of learning than to the street corners from which I had so often heard his gospel preached. And I marveled that any modern system of social education could ignore the man who stood like a great fixed monument in the way of the world.