Dictionary of Literary Biography on Festus Claudius McKay
Once, on being asked his nationality, Claude McKay flippantly answered that he preferred to think of himself as an "internationalist." Though lightly given, the answer was not far off the mark. Born a British subject in Jamaica, McKay immigrated to the United States in 1912 and in 1914 adopted Harlem as his permanent base. From 1919 until 1924, however, he spent little time in New York City. From 1919 to 1921 he was in London, and after a return to New York, he made a pilgrimage to Russia in 1922-1923, where he was lionized by the leaders of the revolution and the Russian people. After Russia he went, by way of Germany, to France, where, excepting several trips to North Africa, he would remain until he returned to Harlem in 1934.
Arriving in Paris in the fall of 1923, McKay found a world of "radicals, esthetes, painters and writers, pseudo-artists, [and] bohemian tourists--all mixed tolerantly and congenially enough together," but this largely white expatriate world was not to his personal taste. "I never considered myself identical with the white expatriates," he writes, though he confessed, "I was a kind of sympathetic fellow-traveller in the expatriate caravan." In spite of his sympathy for them, McKay found the reasons for expatriation which motivated the white community too different from his own reasons for exile to make common cause with them. Unlike those who repudiated America for a variety of largely cultural reasons, McKay admits "I was in love with the large rough unclassical rhythms of American life," and he did not share the attitudes toward their homeland that sent most Americans abroad in the twenties. Rather, he says, "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."
This strong sense of color-induced alienation seems to have characterized much of McKay's relationship to the Paris literary community. Often invited to Gertrude Stein's salon, for example, he regularly refused to go because of an "aversion to cults and disciples" and because he "liked meeting people as persons, not as divinities in temples." This same attitude may account for his seeming lack of interest in meeting either James Joyce or Ernest Hemingway, both of whose work he admired immensely but neither of whom he sought out. He did meet Sinclair Lewis, with whom he spent a long evening of talk, during which Lewis, "in a shrewd American way," gave him "a few cardinal and practical points about the writing of a book or novel" that McKay says he "did not forget when I got down to writing Home to Harlem ."
Just as color isolated McKay in Paris, it eventually induced him to make his French headquarters in the Marseilles area. He had supported himself in Paris by posing nude in unheated artists' studios, which eventually undermined his health and led to an attack of pneumonia. In search of a more tolerable climate, he went south to the Mediterranean coast, where he found a community more to his liking than white Paris. "It was a relief to get to Marseilles," he writes,
to live in among a great gang of black and brown humanity. Negroids from the United States, the West Indies, North Africa and West Africa, all herded together in a warm group. Negroid features and complexions, not exotic, creating curiosity and hostility, but unique and natural to a group.... It was good to feel the strength and distinction of a group and the assurance of belonging to it.
McKay seems to have found the South of France more conducive to work than Paris had been. He wrote two of his novels, Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929), there using in the latter the waterfront of Marseilles as background. It was Marseilles, rather than Paris, which seems most to have been, as McKay says, "one of those places which stirred me up to creative expression."
This is the complete article, containing 654 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
