When in 1928, from self-imposed exile, Claude McKay wrote Home to Harlem, many of us hoped that a prose and verse writer of stellar talent would himself come home, physically and psychologically, to take a warranted and helpful place in the group of “New Negro” writers. But although now back on the American scene and obviously attached to Harlem by literary adoption, this undoubted talent is still spiritually unmoored, and by the testimony of this latest book, is a longer way from home than ever. A critical reader would know this without his own confession; but Mr. McKay, exposing others, succeeds by chronic habit in exposing himself and paints an apt spiritual portrait in two sentences when he says: “I had wandered far and away until I had grown into a truant by nature and undomesticated in the blood”—and later,—“I am so intensely subjective as a poet, that I was not aware, at the moment of writing, that I was transformed into a medium to express a mass sentiment.” All of which amounts to self-characterization as the unabashed “playboy of the Negro Renaissance.”
Real spokesmanship and representative character in the “Negro Renaissance,”—or for that matter any movement, social or cultural,—may depend, of course, on many factors according to time and circumstance, but basic and essential, at least, are the acceptance of some group loyalty and the intent, as well as the ability, to express mass sentiment. Certainly and peculiarly in this case: otherwise the caption of race is a misnomer and the racial significance so irrelevant as to be silly. We knew before 1925 that Negroes could be poets; what we forecast and expected were Negro writers expressing a folk in expressing themselves. Artists have a right to be individualists, of course, but if their work assumes racial expression and interpretation, they must abide by it. On this issue, then, instead of repudiating racialism and its implied loyalties, Mr. McKay blows hot and cold with the same breath; erratically accepting and rejecting racial representatives, like a bad boy who admits he ought to go to school and then plays truant. It is this spiritual truancy which is the blight of his otherwise splendid talent.
Lest this seem condemnation out of court, let us examine the record. If out of a half dozen movements to which there could have been some deep loyalty of attachment, none has claimed McKay’s whole-hearted support, then surely this career is not one of cosmopolitan experiment or even of innocent vagabondage, but, as I have already implied, one of chronic and perverse truancy. It is with the record of these picaresque wanderings that McKay crowds the pages of A Long Way from Home. First, there was a possible brilliant spokesmanship of the Jamaican peasant-folk, for it was as their balladist that McKay first attracted attention and help from his West Indian patrons. But that was soon discarded for a style and philosophy of aesthetic individualism in the then current mode of pagan impressionism. As the author of this personalism,—so unrecognizable after the tangy dialect of the Clarendon hill-folk,—
‘Your voice is the colour of a robin’s breast
And there’s a sweet sob in it like rain,
Still rain in the night among the leaves of the trumpet tree’
McKay emigrated to our shores and shortly adopted the social realism and racial Negro notes of Harlem Shadows and The Harlem Dancer. These were among the first firmly competent accents of New Negro poetry, and though an adopted son, McKay was hailed as the day-star of that bright dawn. However, by his own admission playing off Max Eastman against Frank Harris and James Oppenheimer, he rapidly moved out toward the humanitarian socialism of The Liberator with the celebrated radical protest of If We Must Die; and followed that adventuresome flourish, still with his tongue in his cheek, to Moscow and the lavish hospitality and hero-worship of the Third Comintern. Then by a sudden repudiation there was a prolonged flight into expatriate cosmopolitanism and its irresponsible exoticisms. Even McKay admits the need for some apologia at this point. Granting, for the sake of argument, that the “adventure in Russia” and the association with The Liberator were not commitments to some variety of socialism (of this, the author says:—“I had no radical party affiliations, and there was no reason why I should consider myself under any special obligations to the Communists … I had not committed myself to anything. I had remained a free agent …”) what, we may reasonably ask, about the other possible loyalty, on the basis of which the Russian ovation had been earned, viz,—the spokesmanship for the proletarian Negro? In the next breath, literally the next paragraph, McKay repudiates that also in the sentence we have already quoted:—“I was not aware, at the moment of writing, that I was transformed into a medium to express a mass sentiment.” Yet the whole adventuresome career between 1918 and 1922, alike in Bohemian New York, literary Harlem and revolutionary Moscow, was predicated upon this assumed representativeness, cleverly exploited. One does not know whether to recall Peter before the triple cock-crow or Paul’s dubious admonition about being “all things to all men.” Finally, in the face of the obvious Bohemianism of the wanderings on the Riviera and in Morocco, we find McKay disowning common cause with the exotic cosmopolitans,—“my white fellow-expatriates,” and claiming that “color-consciousness was the fundamental of my restlessness.” Yet from this escapist escapade, we find our prodigal racialist returning expecting the fatted calf instead of the birch-rod, with a curtain lecture on “race salvation” from within and the necessity for a “Negro Messiah,” whose glory he would like to celebrate “in a monument of verse.”
Even a fascinating style and the naivest egotism cannot cloak such inconsistency or condone such lack of common loyalty. One may not dictate a man’s loyalties, but must, at all events, expect him to have some. For a genius maturing in a decade of racial self-expression and enjoying the fruits of it all and living into a decade of social issues and conflict and aware of all that, to have repudiated all possible loyalties amounts to self-imposed apostasy. McKay is after all the dark-skinned psychological twin of that same Frank Harris, whom he so cleverly portrays and caricatures; a versatile genius caught in the ego-centric predicament of aesthetic vanity and exhibitionism. And so, he stands to date, the enfant terrible of the Negro Renaissance, where with a little loyalty and consistency he might have been at least its Villon and perhaps its Voltaire.
If this were merely an individual fate, it could charitably go unnoticed. But in some vital sense these aberrations of spirit, this lack of purposeful and steady loyalty of which McKay is the supreme example have to a lesser extent vitiated much of the talent of the first generation of “New Negro” writers and artists. They inherited, it is true, a morbid amount of decadent aestheticism, which they too uncritically imitated. They also had to reckon with “shroud of color.” To quote Countee Cullen, they can be somewhat forgiven for “sailing the doubtful seas” and for being tardily, and in some cases only half-heartedly led “to live persuaded by their own.” But, with all due allowances, there was an unpardonable remainder of spiritual truancy and social irresponsibility. The folk have rarely been treated by these artists with unalloyed reverence and unselfish loyalty. The commitment to racial materials and “race expression” should be neither that of a fashionable and profitable fad nor of a condescending and missionary duty. The one great flaw of the first decade of the Negro Renaissance was its exhibitionist flair. It should have addressed itself more to the people themselves and less to the gallery of faddist Negrophiles. The task confronting the present younger generation of Negro writers and artists is to approach the home scene and the folk with high seriousness, deep loyalty, racial reverence of the unspectacular, unmelodramatic sort, and when necessary, sacrificial social devotion. They must purge this flippant exhibitionism, this posy but not too sincere racialism, this care-free and irresponsible individualism.
The program of the Negro Renaissance was to interpret the folk to itself, to vitalize it from within; it was a wholesome, vigorous, assertive racialism, even if not explicitly proletarian in conception and justification. McKay himself yearns for some such thing, no doubt, when he speaks in his last chapter of the Negro’s need to discover his “group soul.” A main aim of the New Negro movement will be unrealized so long as that remains undiscovered and dormant; and it is still the task of the Negro writer to be a main agent in evoking it, even if the added formula of proletarian art be necessary to cure this literary anaemia and make our art the nourishing life blood of the people rather than the caviar and cake of the artists themselves. Negro writers must become truer sons of the people, more loyal providers of spiritual bread and less aesthetic wastrels and truants of the streets.