by Claude McKay
PENGUIN CLASSICS
AMIABLE WITH BIG TEETH
CLAUDE MCKAY (1889–1948) was raised in the parish of Clarendon, Jamaica, the youngest of eleven children of the peasant farmers Thomas and Ann McKay. While still a teenager he began to publish poems in newspapers such as the Kingston Daily Gleaner and the Jamaica Times, some of which were collected in his two groundbreaking books of dialect poetry in traditional verse forms, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads (1912). He moved to the United States to study agriculture but soon settled in New York, where he established himself within the literary scene, placing poems in avant-garde periodicals such as The Seven Arts and Pearson’s, and above all with Max Eastman’s influential socialist magazine The Liberator, where McKay came to serve on the editorial staff. His poetry collection Harlem Shadows (1922) is often described (along with Jean Toomer’s Cane and James Weldon Johnson’s anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry) as one of the key publications that kicked off the surge of artistic activity among African Americans that would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Ironically, McKay would spend almost the entire next decade away from the United States. After traveling to Moscow in 1922 (where he spoke as an unofficial delegate at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International), McKay settled in France, where he wrote his first novel, the bestseller Home to Harlem (1928), and began work on his second, Banjo (1929), which he completed while voyaging in Spain and Morocco. He eventually took up residence in Tangier, where he lived from 1930 to 1934 and completed a book of short stories, Gingertown (1932), and another novel, Banana Bottom (1933). In 1934, McKay returned to the United States, where he struggled to find employment before joining the New York branch of the Federal Writers’ Project, which allowed him to complete his autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937). The last book McKay was able to publish in his lifetime was a study of black life in New York, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). Despite a succession of serious health problems beginning in 1941, he continued to write poetry and composed Amiable with Big Teeth under contract with E. P. Dutton (which had previously published Harlem: Negro Metropolis), although in the end Dutton declined the novel. McKay became involved in the activities of Friendship House, a Catholic-sponsored community center in Harlem. By 1944 McKay had formally converted to Catholicism and moved to Chicago, where he spent the remainder of his life teaching classes at the Catholic Youth Organization.
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE CLOUTIER is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD from Columbia University, where he also interned as an archivist and processed the papers of Samuel Roth, Erica Jong, and Barney Rosset. He is the editor of the original French writings of Jack Kerouac, La vie est d’hommage (2016), and translator of Kerouac’s two French novellas, “The Night Is My Woman” (La nuit est ma femme) and “On the Road: Old Bull in the Bowery” (Sur le chemin), in The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings (2016), where his Translator’s Note also appears. He contributed the essay on the 1948 “Harlem Is Nowhere” collaboration between Ralph Ellison and Gordon Parks for Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem (2016). His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Huffington Post, BOMB magazine, Le Monde, Maclean’s, and several other media outlets. Cloutier’s articles, reviews, and translations have also appeared in Modernism/modernity, Novel, Cinema Journal, Public Books, A Time for the Humanities, and elsewhere.
BRENT HAYES EDWARDS is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and was a runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. With Robert G. O’Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he coedited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004). Edwards was appointed the Harlem Renaissance period editor for the revised third edition of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2014), and he has also prepared scholarly editions of classic works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Joseph Conrad. His most recent work includes Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017) and his translation of Michel Leiris’s 1934 Phantom Africa (2017), for which Edwards was awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant.
Claude McKay, July 25, 1941. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten / The Van Vechten Trust / Beinecke Library, Yale.
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Copyright © 2017 by the Literary Estate for the Works of Claude McKay
Introduction and notes copyright © 2017 by Jean-Christophe Cloutier and Brent Hayes Edwards
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Excerpts from letters by Claude McKay to Carl Cowl on July 28, 1947; to Max Eastman on March 22, 1941 and July 28, 1941; to Mr. Kohn on March 23, 1942; to Catherine Latimer on February 19, 1941; to Ruth Raphael on January 21, 1942; and to Simon Williamson on May 29, 1941, are used with the permission of the Literary Estate for the Works of Claude McKay.
Excerpts from letters from Max Eastman to Claude McKay reprinted by permission of the Yvette and Max Eastman Estate.
Ebook ISBN 9781101628195
Art & design: Sean G. Qualls
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Contents
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction by JEAN-CHRISTOPHE CLOUTIER and BRENT HAYES EDWARDS
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Text
AMIABLE WITH BIG TEETH
1. “Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands to God”
2. The Peixota Home
3. The Peixota Family
4. Professor Koazhy Is Featured
5. The Emperor’s Letter
6. The Branding of a Black Fascist
7. The Tower and the Airplane
8. Saying It with Kisses
9. Mrs. Peixota Chaperones Her Daughter
10. “All We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray”
11. The Emperor’s Statement
12. Alamaya Makes His Submission
13. The Merry-Go-Round
14. Peixota’s Humiliation
15. Seraphine Leaves Home
16. A Princess of Ethiopia
17. A Pre-Nuptial Night
18. Seraphine Discovers the Letter
19. Princess Benebe and Gloria Kendall
20. Art and Race
21. “As Beautiful as a Jewel”
22. Alamaya Lands a Real Job
23. The Leopards Dance
Explanatory Notes
Editors’ Acknowledgments
Introduction
Habent sua fata libelli1
—Terentianus Maurus
In 1940, after publishers rejected the Irish writer Flann O’Brien’s manuscript of The Third P
oliceman, published posthumously in 1967 and now considered a masterpiece, O’Brien put it away in a drawer, pretended to friends that it had been lost, and never spoke of it again. A year later, around July or August of 1941, E. P. Dutton declined to publish Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth. Like O’Brien, McKay seems to have never again mentioned his novel, or at least the archive bears no such trace; but unlike the Irish novelist, McKay did not control the destiny of his own manuscript. That task, in a strange twist of fate, fell to Samuel Roth, a convicted pornographer and reputed literary “pirate”—a misleading epithet that haunted the independent, infamous New York–based publisher for his entire career.2 Hidden in Roth’s files, the manuscript lingered, deracinated from its original provenance.
The discovery of an unpublished and previously unknown manuscript by a major modern writer is a rare occurrence. While the collections of important literary figures are often mined for juvenilia, ephemera, undisclosed or unfinished projects—one thinks of recent publications drawn from the papers of Vladimir Nabokov (The Original of Laura), Ralph Ellison (Three Days Before the Shooting), Jack Kerouac (La vie est d’hommage; The Unknown Kerouac), Harper Lee (Go Set a Watchman), and David Foster Wallace (The Pale King), for instance—it is not often that there appears a complete and corrected typescript by a well-known twentieth-century novelist.3 Thus the publication of McKay’s long-lost Amiable with Big Teeth is a cause for celebration as well as a monumental literary event.
The novel is as vibrant and accomplished as McKay’s other celebrated works of long fiction, Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933). But Amiable with Big Teeth, with its piquant burlesque of political machinations in Harlem during the mid-1930s in response to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, is an eye-opening addition to McKay’s body of work, taking up new and different themes and greatly expanding our understanding of his concerns in the final decade of his life. McKay, who spoke as an unofficial representative of the “American Negro” at the 1922 Fourth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow and interacted with many of the key leftist intellectuals of the era in the United States and Europe (including Trotsky, George Bernard Shaw, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frank Harris, Max Eastman, Louise Bryant, and John Reed), is widely recognized as one of the most important literary and political writers of the interwar period. Amiable with Big Teeth gives us for the first time McKay’s fictional take on the tumult of the 1930s, including the Popular Front and the rise of fascism.
The last book McKay saw published in his lifetime was his ambitious nonfictional work Harlem: Negro Metropolis, which was released by E. P. Dutton in 1940. In his biography Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance, Wayne Cooper notes that McKay “tried also to publish at least one more book-length manuscript.”4 In fact, he worked on multiple book projects in his final years, including a sonnet collection he called “The Cycle” (composed around 1943), a manuscript of his “Selected Poems,” and a memoir of his childhood called My Green Hills of Jamaica (written in 1946).5 Some sources describe the short, possibly incomplete novel Harlem Glory as McKay’s “final” attempt at fiction. But evidence in McKay’s correspondence proves that he composed Harlem Glory around 1936–37, before he wrote Harlem: Negro Metropolis.6
There have been hints that McKay was also working on a novel in the last years of his life. Many years after his passing, the writer’s last agent, Carl Cowl, became aware of the existence of a book manuscript McKay had supposedly written in the 1940s. In a letter to the French literary critic Jean Wagner in early 1970, Cowl mentions that Dutton claimed to have paid McKay $475 as an advance on a novel titled “God’s Black Sheep” that the publisher ended up rejecting.7 The phrase “God’s black sheep” clearly echoes the subtitle of Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem, and is most likely an alternate or working title of the same book. The formulations “God’s black sheep” and “poor black sheep” do indeed appear repeatedly in Amiable with Big Teeth, especially in Reverend Zebulon Trawl’s sermon in Chapter 10. But Cowl never found a copy of the manuscript, for reasons we explain below.
• • •
In February 1934, McKay returned to New York nearly penniless after almost twelve years living as an expatriate in France, Spain, and Morocco.8 His financial struggles continued, as literary opportunities in the city had dried up with the advent of the Great Depression, but McKay kept writing, starting work, for example, on the autobiographical manuscript that would be published as A Long Way from Home in 1937. Still, as Cooper points out, the autobiography is “only partially indicative of how completely involved he had become in the social and political controversies that dominated the American literary scene in the 1930s.”9
Upon his return, McKay quickly immersed himself in the Harlem arts scene, which remained energetic despite the bleak economy. McKay grew close to a number of visual artists linked to the attempts to found a Harlem Artists’ Guild in 1935, especially the painters Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, who both had studios in the building at 33 West 125th Street, where McKay would live for a couple of years at the end of the decade.10 But he was especially active in the Harlem literary scene. McKay tried to found a literary journal called Bambara in 1936 and was at the center of the effort to establish a Negro Writers’ Guild the next year, which brought together some of the most talented younger writers and an eclectic group of leading literary lights from the 1920s, including Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Arthur Schomburg, Jessie Fauset, and Richard Bruce Nugent.11
The most important institution in McKay’s life in this period, however, was the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), which provided a crucial “refuge from destitution” (to adopt Cooper’s phrase) by employing McKay on its “Negroes in New York” project from the spring of 1936 through the end of 1939.12 His colleagues at the FWP offices in the Port Authority Building on lower Eighth Avenue included many of the most talented black writers in the city, such as Dorothy West, Abram Hill, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, J. A. Rogers, Richard Bruce Nugent, Simon Williamson, Waring Cuney, and Ted Poston. The FWP team undertook an ambitious project collecting resources for the study of black New York. McKay himself wrote essays on topics as various as “Negro Artists in New York,” “Negroes from New York in the US Diplomatic Service,” “Group Life and Literature,” and “On the First Negroes Coming to America,” and conducted interviews with artists including Augusta Savage, Romare Bearden, and Beauford Delaney.13 The FWP was invaluable not only in providing McKay a regular paycheck but also in supporting his own work, since, as he himself put it, the “special research work” of the project—which mainly involved biographical sketches and interviews of significant Harlem personalities, and short overview essays on major themes in African American history—gave the writers a range of resources that were “of intrinsic value to those of us who were writing about Negro life in our off-project time.”14
If the resources of the FWP were instrumental for McKay’s work on Harlem: Negro Metropolis (a book that included detailed discussions of black luminaries such as Marcus Garvey, Casper Holstein, Father Divine, A. Philip Randolph, and Sufi Abdul Hamid, for which McKay drew on FWP materials to supplement his own firsthand impressions), they proved equally crucial for Amiable with Big Teeth. A number of Harlem personalities (including Hamid and the infamous black fighter pilot Hubert Fauntleroy Julian) are depicted by name in McKay’s novel, and a number of fictional scenes echo historical episodes and information in the FWP archive.
Perhaps the most striking example is the extraordinary section of Amiable with Big Teeth devoted to a portrait of a nightclub in Harlem called the Merry-Go-Round, the “largest and bawdiest bar in Lenox Avenue,” where young men “had charcoaled and elongated their eyebrows and rouged their cheeks like the girls” (p. 147). The eponymous Chapter 13, set in the streets outside the Merry-Go-Round during an anti-Italian protest—remarkably reminiscent of actual events, such
as the demonstration that erupted in violence in July 1936 in front of the Bella Restaurant at 329 Lenox Avenue between 126th and 127th Streets15—describes the goings-on in the Merry-Go-Round in a manner that seems informed not only by McKay’s knowledge of Harlem nightlife but also of specific FWP materials such as Wilbur Young’s rich biographical piece on Gladys Bentley, the legendary cross-dressing lesbian singer who thrilled and scandalized audiences at Harlem spots such as Hansberry’s Clam House (on 133rd Street) and the Ubangi Club (on Seventh Avenue at 131st Street), with its “chorus of singing, dancing, be-ribboned and be-rouged ‘pansies.’”16
Amiable with Big Teeth is set in the mid-1930s during what became known as the “Italo-Abyssinian crisis,” which erupted in October 1935 when Mussolini’s forces invaded Ethiopia. McKay’s novel is above all concerned with efforts among the Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the defense of Ethiopia. The FWP collected a good deal of material on this topic, with a richness of detail that would have been very difficult to obtain elsewhere only a few short years after the events. Indeed, McKay’s Harlem: Negro Metropolis was one of the first books to include substantial historical coverage of the crisis.17
If Amiable with Big Teeth might then be described as an elaboration of this thread in Harlem: Negro Metropolis, McKay’s novel takes a notably different approach from his opinionated nonfiction study.18 Amiable with Big Teeth is a satirical yet sentimental political novel full of earnest pleas and impassioned rhetoric, public grandstanding and nefarious backroom imposture, savvy diplomacy and dimwit romance. Set in the turbulent Harlem of 1936, the novel immerses the reader in the concerns, anxieties, hopes, and dreams at the heart of black America during a period when (to quote the opening of Chapter 4) the “tides of Italy’s war in Ethiopia had swept up out of Africa and across the Atlantic to beat against the shores of America and strangely to agitate the unheroic existence of Aframericans” (p. 27).
