A Long Way From Home.pdf - Site de Thomas - Free

introduction • xxiii
A Long Way from Home includes descriptions and excerpts from his
poetic oeuvre, thus capturing his impressions of time and place while
highlighting his literary versatility.
McKay’s poetry was born out of a tension between the necessity of
daily work and the desire for leisure. Early on in his career, he refused to
reveal to his railroad coworkers that he was a “scribbler”and had literary
ambitions. McKay was in the workforce but not of it. Daily work distracted
him from his literary goals, but he still found a way to dream: “I
had a desire to be away from my [railroad] fellows and off by myself,
even if it were in a crowd. My mind was full of the rendezvous with that
editor in New York.”Even when he was arrested on suspicion of dodging
the World War I draft and then crammed in “an old-fashioned fetid
hole” called a jail cell, McKay concentrated on his literary future:“I tried
to overcome the stench by breathing through my mind all the fragrant
verse I could find in the range of my memory” (chapter 1).
For a long time, McKay could only “scribble a stanza of poetry in
the interval between trains,” where he worked as a young man,
instead of “a paragraph of prose” (chapter 1). The fact that he could
write verse between moments when he needed to work indicated the
conflict between two kinds of labor: literary writing, which to some
extent required leisure time, and jobs such as being a porter, fireman,
waiter, bar-boy, and houseman, all of which denied him leisure time.
McKay’s daily responsibilities robbed him of the opportunities for
leisure available in a literary-professional life. The tension between
literary and nonliterary labor informed his demurral to the request
of Frank Harris, the editor of Pearson’s, that McKay write prose instead
of verse as his proof of artistic “maturity.” It was not so much that
McKay lacked maturity, though he was still a relatively young man in
his late twenties when Harris made this request. Quite simply, McKay
did not yet have enough undistracted time to think about and write
prose. But he did have such free time while traveling abroad, and
unsurprisingly, beginning in 1923, he became a prolific writer of fiction
and nonfiction. 10
McKay understood that literary work was a profession that required
leisure time. But he struggled to find that kind of time. Thus when Mr.
Gray, a potential white patron, thought that McKay “should have
enough leisure to write more”and that he could achieve this by traveling
abroad, McKay disregarded such “idealistic actions” as impractical and