A Long Way from Home

The memoir opens with McKay's arrival in America and his early Harlem years, then follows him to London, where he read Marx and worked on a socialist paper, and back to New York and the editorship of The Liberator alongside Max Eastman.

The Soviet section is the strangest and most vivid. McKay went to Moscow in 1922 and was received as a celebrity — carried through crowds, addressed to the Comintern, sculpted and photographed. He writes about it with a mixture of pleasure and unease, aware that he was being used as an exhibit and enjoying it anyway.

Then Europe: Berlin, and the long French years from 1923 to 1928. He is candid about being poor and often ill, about working as an artist's model, and about disliking the wealthy, largely white expatriate circles of literary Paris — the same Paris, in the same years, that produced the Lost Generation memoirs. His interest is in Marseille instead, where Banjo came from. The book closes after Morocco and his return to the United States.

Running underneath is the refusal. McKay would not be the Communist Party's writer, or the Harlem Renaissance establishment's, or anyone's representative Negro artist, and much of the memoir is him explaining why with considerable bite.