Black Ikon

A LONG WAY FROM HOME--Claude McKay--Furman ($3).

The U.S. "Negro Renaissance" in the 1920s played to the biggest white audience since the Civil War, started an apartment-house boom on Harlem's swanky sugar Hill, put on one of the most curious performances in U.S. letters. Among noted Negro writers of that peiod Claud McKay appeared earliest, made his career the best barometer of white intest in that strange awakening. A Long Way from Home tells why.

At 22 the author of a book of West Indian dialect poems about his native Jamaica. Claude McKay went to Tuskegee Institute, switched to Kansas State Agricultural College, quit to become a dining-car waiter. In 1918 tiny, roaring Frank Harris certified him a genius. More encouragement came from Max Eastman and Floyd Dell. McKay went to London to meet Shaw, who reminded him of "an evergreen plant grown indoors...an antelope...chinaware," Shaw asked: "Why didn't you choose pugilism instead of poetry? They talked about plays and cathedrals; when the War was mentioned, Shaw "let out a whinny...like a young colt in distress." Sylvia Pankhurst, famed ex-suffraget leader, gave McKay a job reporting for her Workers' Dreadnought. Back in New York he became associate editor of The Liberator under Eastman, quarreled with the Reddest of his colleagues, received an office visit from Elinor Wylie, whose "beauty and Park Avenue elegance" flustered him terribly. At Eugen Boissevain's house he met Charlie Chaplin, who was chased one evening from room to room by a determined Harlem female admirer "coo-coo-cooing, just as if she were down home in the bushes." When a long-lost wife showed up, McKay eluded her by going to Russia, got in under a British Communist's endorsement as observer at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International.

The American delegation said he was not invited, tried to send him home, thawed out grudgingly when the Russians decided to make a "black ikon" of him. Said his guide and drinking companion: "All Russia loves you, not we Communists only, but even the damned bourgeoisie. . . .

Get up on my back and I will carry you all over Russia." McKay had a friendly talk with Trotsky, who gave him a free pass to look at the Red Army and Navy.

Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, was an "ex-tremely plain woman, really ugly," who prompted Max Eastman to say: "Lenin would probably get well if he had a pretty girl!" In Paris, Poet McKay joined the expatriate throngs, caught a hacking cough by posing in the nude, was given a check to keep him three months in southern France by John Reed's widow, Louise Bryant. He gave up a job in Rex Ingram's Nice movie studio after chasing a co-worker with a knife, and wrote his sensational novel Home To Harlem. In Morocco, McKay's next stop, he liked everything except the French authorities, who asked him to leave. But even in Africa he was pursued by whites. Negrophile Nancy Cunard wrote to him, asked him to contribute to a Negro anthology, was offended when McKay asked to be paid for it.

Somewhat disillusioned now by his erst while Negrophile friends and acquaintances, Claude McKay looks forward to a "great modern Negro leader" who can think up a better solution to the Negro problem than taking them back to Africa.

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