A long way from home

by Claude McKay

For I was in love with the large rough unclassical rhythms of American life. If I were sometimes awed by its brutal bigness, I was nevertheless fascinated by its titanic strength. I rejoiced in the lavishness of the engineering exploits and the architectural splendors of New York.

I never could agree that literature and art could not flourish in America. That idea was altogether contrary to my historical outlook. I believed that there would be an American art and culture mainly derived from Europe and augmented by the arts and cultures of other countries precisely as there had been a distinct Roman art and culture mainly derived from Greece, but augmented by the arts and cultures of the countries that Rome had conquered. For America appeared to me preeminently a vast outpost of European civilization, being, in its relation to Europe, what Northern Europe was to Rome under the empire. When Europeans said to me: "The Americans, they are barbarians," it stirred up a romantic sensation, and I thought that that was exactly the manner in which the ancient Romans spoke of the inhabitants of Iberia and Gaul and Germany and Britain.

Again, I was not oversensitive about the American public taking the writer and artist like the average person instead of isolating him in an ivory tower. I am partial to the idea of an artist being of and among the people, even if incognito. The puritan atmosphere of America was irritating, but it was not suffocating. I had written some of my most vigorous poems right through and straight out of the tumult and turbulence of American life.

And lastly, sex was never much of a problem to me. I played at sex as a child in a healthy harmless way. When I was seventeen or eighteen I became aware of the ripe urge of potency and also the strange manifestations and complications of sex. I grew up in the spacious peasant country, and although there are problems and strangenesses of sex also in the country, they are not similar to those of the city. I never made a problem of sex. As I grew up I was privileged to read a variety of books in my brother's library and soon I became intellectually cognizant of sex problems. But physically my problems were reduced to a minimum. And the more I traveled and grew in age and experience, the less they became.

What, then, was my main psychological problem? It was the problem of color. Color-consciousness was the fundamental of my restlessness. And it was something with which my white fellow-expatriates could sympathize but which they could not altogether understand. For they were not black like me. Not being black and unable to see deep into the profundity of blackness, some even thought that I might have preferred to be white like them. They couldn't imagine that I had no desire merely to exchange my black problem for their white problem. For all their knowledge and sophistication, they couldn't understand the instinctive and animal and purely physical pride of a black person resolute in being himself and yet living a simple civilized life like themselves. Because their education in their white world had trained them to see a person of color either as an inferior or as an exotic.

I believe that I understood more about the expatriates than they understood of me, as I went along in the rhythm of their caravan; yet, although our goal was not the same, I was always overwhelmingly in sympathy with its purpose. From conventional Americans visiting Europe I used to hear severe criticisms directed at the expatriate caravan. The critics thought that the expatriates were wasting their time and that American creative artists should stay at home and explore American life. Some of them made an exception of me. They said that because the social life of the Negro was strictly limited in America, it might be better for a Negro who is a creative artist to seek more freedom abroad. But I was not taken in by that specious form of flattery. As I have indicated before, I was aware that if there were problems specifically black, also there were problems specifically white.

I liked the spectacle of white American youngsters of both sexes enjoying the freedom of foreigners with money on the café terraces of Continental Europe. I liked to watch their feats of unprohibited drinking and listen to their elastic conversations and see them casually taking in their stride the cosmopolitan world of people of different races and colors. Even if they were not all intent upon or able to create works of art, I did not see them as idlers and wasters, but as students of life.

My English friend, Mr. Jekyll, had informed me that it was a custom of the English bourgeoisie and aristocracy to let their sons travel by themselves abroad for a year or so after they had finished college. The British Empire must have gained much from that practice. So I felt that America also could gain something from its youngsters circulating abroad and mingling with foreigners on their own ground. Certainly, whatever they were before, they could not be worse Americans after that experience.

James Joyce's Ulysses was published when I arrived in Paris. And Ernest Hemingway's first little book of miniature stories In Our Time came out that same year. A good friend gave me a copy of Ulysses. A bad friend swiped it.

James Joyce incomparably and legitimately was le maître among the moderns. I cannot imagine any modern and earnest student of literary artistry of that period who did not consider it necessary to study James Joyce. I was privileged to have a few acquaintances of radical sympathies among the moderns, and they all advised me to read Joyce before I started to write. So I did. Some of them thought, as I, that Ulysses was even greater as a textbook for modern writers than as a novel for the general public.