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9780859894579

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An autobiography of the early years of Claude McKay - a black sheep member of the Harlem Renaissance - written when he was dying in sickness and poverty in the 1940's. The book - filled as it is with sun, easy laughter, music, goofing off - provides an extreme contrast to McKay's external circumstances and one cannot help wondering why he never returned to that beautiful garden. It all sounds a bit unreal and implausibly utopian - barefoot boys in a hill town 22 miles from the nearest railroad regularly reading their imported copies of The Spectator, The Times, Argosy and The New York Herald - when McKay needed a job he was accepted into the constabulary (though he was too short), and when he needed to get out (even if enlistment was for an irrevocable five years) he could. There was apparently no racism and McKay found an aristocratic English mentor who not only encouraged him in his writings and got his poems published, but even led him to abandon the artificial style of late 19th-century English verse in favor of the Jamaican dialect for which McKay later became famous. Unfortunately, the admirably clear, direct prose of this autobiography could have been written by anyone: there is no distinct flavor - either of McKay or Jamaica or anything else. Circumstances are narrated with little or no comment, and we are given merely the most superficial externals of McKay's life. One wishes for more - of the man, of the country. (Kirkus Reviews)

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