Amiable with Big Teeth

by Claude McKay

  It is in these articles and editorials that McKay first begins to articulate what becomes the increasingly fervent anti-Communist stance that is a key feature of his late career, as evidenced by Harlem: Negro Metropolis, Amiable with Big Teeth, and many of the poems in his 1943 “Cycle” sequence. The rhetorical tone in these articles is often as heated and hyperbolic as some of the more polemical passages in the novel. In one 1939 piece in the New Leader, for instance, in which McKay discusses “the danger of Negroes coming under the control of Moscow-dominated Communists exploiting their grievances”—which of course is the main theme of Amiable with Big Teeth as well—McKay goes so far as to declare that “the Communist dictatorship is a greater danger to humanity than the Nazi dictatorship.”62 In Harlem: Negro Metropolis, he complains that in the late 1930s “Harlem was overrun with white Communists who promoted themselves as the only leaders of the Negroes. They were converting a few Negroes into Bolshevik propagandists, but they were actually doing nothing to help alleviate the social misery of Negroes.”63 It is logical, then, that in writing Amiable with Big Teeth, McKay would set this theme in the context of pro-Ethiopian activism, since it was during the Italo-Ethiopian crisis that McKay had first inveighed against the pattern of Communist intervention.

  McKay’s mistrust of Communism emerged as a principled response to what he observed in the political currents of his time, rather than a knee-jerk rejection of Marxism or a simple retreat from his previous affiliation with political radicalism in many forms, including the Comintern itself (in his 1922 visit to Moscow). Throughout his career, he was consistent in his discomfort with groupthink of any sort: “I am intellectually independent and not specifically labeled with any ‘ism,’” as he put it in one 1937 article.64 At the same time, McKay was equally consistent in his commitment to social and economic justice, and as late as the fall of 1938 he explicitly praised the Communist Party for its role in labor relations in the United States, writing in one article that “it must be admitted that more than any other group the Communists should be credited with the effective organizing of the unemployed and relief workers.” What he rejected, McKay explained, was not the principles of unionism or Marxism itself, but instead the “basic political ideology” of Communism: “I reject absolutely the idea of government by dictatorship, which is the pillar of political Communism.” While critical of the Popular Front, which he considered a “smoke screen,” McKay was above all worried that black political organizations would be manipulated for purely propagandistic ends: “As a member of this group and also as a radical thinker, I am specially concerned about its future and the danger of its being maneuvered through high-powered propaganda into the morass of Communist opportunism.”65 Or as he rephrased his objection in Harlem: Negro Metropolis, “the Communists were out to exploit all the social disadvantages of the Negro minority for propaganda effect, but they were little interested in practical efforts to ameliorate the social conditions of that minority.”66

  The titular metaphor of Amiable with Big Teeth, which might at first seem obscure or even cryptic—in June 1941, one Harlem friend wrote McKay to congratulate him on completing the novel, adding that she was “trying to think what that High faluting title could be”67—is at its base a variation on the biblical warning against false prophets (i.e., the wolf in sheep’s clothing).68 There are echoes of this sort of metaphor in a number of McKay’s articles and editorials in the late 1930s, where they serve as a figure for his fear that African Americans were being “dangerously misled” by Communist activists in the Popular Front.69 For McKay, this fear was exacerbated by his sense that the “Negro world” was especially vulnerable to such manipulation, given its limited resources and its weakness due to the ravages of racial segregation and economic exploitation. As he writes in Harlem: Negro Metropolis: “The white world is wide and complex as its boundaries are elastic. A savage onslaught of propaganda is not so powerful and effective as it may be in the Negro world, where all strata are close-packed and the propagandists can leap to action like wolves in an overcrowded sheepfold.”70

  One of McKay’s 1939 articles in the New Leader may come closest to the title of the novel in describing the Communist threat:

  But the Communist hyena disguised as shepherd dog is the sinister enemy that works havoc in the sheepfold under cover of darkness. He is assiduous in unhappy Harlem, often prowling behind the scenes, ready to pounce upon every social issue and convert it into an empty slogan and seeking by any means to discredit the wary individuals and groups that keep him out.71

  In Amiable itself, two of the novel’s major characters, Dorsey Flagg and Lij Alamaya, do employ the word “hyena” in reference to Communists or Stalinites: “I have to use my head against the Stalinite hyena,” says Flagg (p. 187), and when Lij Alamaya is shown evidence that Maxim Tasan is responsible for the theft of his official letter from the Emperor, he punches Tasan in disgust and cries out, “I’m getting out of this hyena’s lair” (p. 218). But although McKay makes recourse to similar metaphors on numerous occasions in his articles and poems,72 there does not seem to be an instance where he employs the exact phrasing (“amiable with big teeth”) that provides the vivid and arresting title of the novel.

  • • •

  Harlem: Negro Metropolis was published in October 1940. That winter, just after the new year, McKay received a letter from his publisher, E. P. Dutton, acknowledging a letter McKay had sent on January 4 to request an appointment to discuss “a novel which you have in mind.”73 McKay met with John Macrae, the president of Dutton, to discuss his plans for the new work. Dutton ended up giving McKay an advance contract for the novel, even agreeing to grant him a $500 advance, paid in weekly installments of $25, to support his writing. McKay moved out of New York, staying at the home of Claude Wells, a friend in the remote town of North Wayne, Maine, in order to work on the book, planning to live on the advance while he was writing.74 Toward the end of February, McKay wrote to Catherine Latimer, the librarian at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library that would become the Schomburg Center, apologizing that he had been slow to reply to a letter she had sent him because he “was fully occupied with literary negotiations and practical matters prior to leaving New York, besides being in the midst of packing.” He explained that he had gone to Maine “to do some important work” and preferred to be isolated, living in a small farmhouse located a dozen miles from the nearest town, “up here where it is cold and bracing.”75

  Interestingly, Macrae wrote to Max Eastman, McKay’s longtime friend and colleague, to request his involvement in McKay’s work on the novel. It seems that Eastman had written Dutton himself in support of McKay’s book. On February 12, 1941, Macrae wrote:

  MY DEAR MAX EASTMAN:

  I had your welcome letter of January 13 in reference to our mutual friend, Claude McKay, and his proposed novel. Partly owing to your good advice, after several important talks with Claude McKay we entered into a contract with him for the writing of this novel. The plan adopted is to provide a certain amount per week for a limited period to Claude McKay. It was the feeling of Claude McKay that he probably could write the novel within the time specified in our contract.

  My literary advisers were of the opinion that the outline which Mr. McKay submitted to us was too melodramatic, and that the novel written on these lines would not satisfy the artistic taste and refinement of Claude McKay. Also, it was the feeling of my literary adviser that we would not care to publish a novel so melodramatic as Claude McKay’s synopsis pictured it.

  As and when Claude McKay provides you with installments of his novel, I will be everlastingly obliged to you if you will assist him with your common sense advice and, added to that, the good taste which is part of your work. I do believe that Claude McKay will write a good novel, and I am taking the liberty of asking you, as far as you can, to give to Claude McKay of your wisdom and your critical sense of what a novel should be.76

  As we will see, Eastman
did give advice to McKay about his manuscript over the next few months.

  McKay discussed the work in progress in many of the letters he wrote while in Maine. In a letter to a seaman, a cook on the Royal Mail Lines based in South Africa, McKay concluded a long screed about the “fraudulent international Popular Front that was promoted by the Communists” and the “ruthless and unscrupulous” Soviet regime with the news that he was “far away up here in Maine writing a new book.”77 He likewise mentioned the novel to labor organizer A. Philip Randolph, who wrote a letter to McKay in April praising the accomplishment of Harlem: Negro Metropolis and went on to say, “I am glad to know that you are now engaged in the writing of a new book, for not only have you a facile style of high excellence, but your ideas on the Negro liberation movement flash out like a diamond from the sands and cut deeply into the consciousness of Negro and white America.”78 McKay’s agent Carlisle Smyth wrote in May that he was “very glad to know that you are in stride again. I am sure the country is by far the best place to work.”79 By the end of May, he was telling friends he was almost done. An acquaintance in Philadelphia wrote back: “I am glad that you have so little to do to finish your book. I am sure that it will be good”;80 and another from Brooklyn offered encouragement: “I am very glad to hear of your completion of your new work, I’m sure it[’s] a killer, etc.”81 Simon Williamson, an old friend from McKay’s days with the Federal Writers’ Project and the Negro Writers’ Guild, wrote toward the end of June 1941: “I am glad the work is shaping up nicely, and wish I could see it before it is published.”82 A month earlier, McKay had asked Williamson to supply him with urgently needed “items” and “facts” for his novel. “I should be happy if you could inform me whether the Spanish Civil War broke in June or July of 1936,” McKay explained. “I want to dovetail the Fascist conquest of Ethiopia into it, but I need to be certain about the facts.”83 Incidentally, since he wrote the novel in Maine, Amiable with Big Teeth has the unlikely distinction of being the only novel McKay ever wrote on American soil—Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Banana Bottom were all written on the other side of the Atlantic.

  It is in McKay’s extensive correspondence with his longtime friend Max Eastman that there is not only this sort of intriguing circumstantial evidence—that McKay had started writing a new work of fiction that had something to do with Ethiopia and the Popular Front—but also explicit discussion of the manuscript in progress that proves beyond any doubt that it was Amiable with Big Teeth. On March 29, 1941, McKay wrote to Eastman:

  Dear Max: I took your advice (half-way) and spent a month, not two, pottering with the plot, characters and aim of the novel. And it has worked out a little differently from the first draft I showed you. The main thing is that it has some politics in it and we had thought it expedient to keep politics out. But after building up the Lij into a really sympathetic character (albeit weak) and consulting notes and newspaper stories of the period (early 1936) in which the tale begins, I discovered that it was impossible to keep politics out, for the Aid to Ethiopia was the jumping-off of the Popular Front movement in the United States. Of course, I am keeping the political stuff in its proper place, so that it may not be a handicap to the straight tale.

  I began the actual writing on the 15th and it is going pretty good and I shall send the duplicate sheets to you as soon as I have from 40 to 50 pages. I believe that it’ll take as much as that to give you the lay of the tale. I have a new agent in New York and she is also keen to see the tale as it unfolds.

  I am working quickly for the time is short and I am not fooling with this chance. I like the climate up here. It has been cold with a lot of snow on the ground (which is now melting and slushy) but the air is dry and keen and I feel a thousand times better than I did in New York. I have a nice large sunny room and a roaring wood fire which is regular and more dependable than the best I was getting in my place in New York. If you should be moving, please let me know as I hope to send the stuff in a couple of weeks.84

  Soon after, McKay did send the first chunk of the manuscript as promised, for Eastman wrote back toward the end of April with praise:

  Claude, I’m perfectly delighted with your book. So is [Eastman’s wife] Eliena as far as she has gone. I was waiting for her to finish, but I don’t want to wait any longer.

  Of course I endorse absolutely your impulse to bring in the Stalinists, and make the canvas as big and significant as it can be. Put in all Harlem and all you know and think about it.

  I am vividly interested in your characters, and that’s the main thing.

  I’ve written in a little suggestion here and there. I have a difficulty, just as in Tolstoy, keeping track at the beginning of which is which. You might help me a little there by repeating in some way who they are the second time you mention them. But then I’m rather dumb as a novel reader, my interest wandering from persons to ideas so easily.

  The only general suggestion I have is: Don’t write it too fast. Don’t work when your [sic] tired. Your style is fine on the whole, but occasionally it sags a little imaginatively. I want to encounter more brilliant visions like “a reddish person and so covered with freckles that he looked like a cinnamon sandwich.” Or: “like children with tinted candies, each one hiding its candy in its fist and insisting it had the prettiest tint.”

  Claude you can make those up by the basketful, when you put your mind to it in idle energy. Your poetry was full of them. Sprinkle them more thickly in your prose. You would, if you were writing a little poetry on the side, as we both always ought to be. It keeps the color in your prose. I think this is enormously important, and it is one of the things I am most certain you can do, if you put your mind—or rather your imagination—to it.

  There wasn’t enough of this in your Harlem book either, but I attributed that to haste. Don’t be hurried. I’ll get additional funds out of Dutton if it keeps up like this. That’s the only big and important thing I have to say. I’m excited and happy about the book.

  Tell me when you write how long your money will last at the rate you are using it. I’m going to keep in touch with Macrae. I’m sure I can get you the time you need to finish such a book. Maybe it’s the great (Afro) American novel after all these years.

  Put everything in it, yourself and everything else.

  Love to you and admiration,

  Max85

  This heartfelt letter is significant because it explicitly names the publisher (Dutton) and its president (Macrae), and because it gives a clear indication that McKay was working under some kind of contractual deadline to finish the book. Most important, Eastman includes quotations from the manuscript McKay had sent him to read. And indeed, both quotations, with their vivid and unusual metaphors, are found in the typescript of Amiable with Big Teeth: “a reddish person and so covered with freckles, he looked like a cinnamon sandwich” is a description of Seraphine Peixota’s absent biological father (p. 24), while the second passage (“like children with tinted candies, each one hiding its candy in its fist and insisting it had the prettiest tint”) is a phrase used to describe Seraphine and her friends (p. 37). In other words, given the peculiar wording of these precise quotations, there can be no doubt that Amiable with Big Teeth was the manuscript in progress McKay sent Eastman to read.

  Shortly after he received the above letter, McKay wrote to Eastman to say that he might not have enough money to stay in Maine past the end of April. Eastman wrote back again immediately, stressing that he would be happy to ask Dutton for more money to support McKay, if necessary: “I am interested in your story, heart and soul, and will do everything in my power to get you money enough to finish it. Please let me know what I have to do.”86 Somehow, it seems a solution was found, because McKay was still in Maine when Eastman wrote him again at the end of May: “I enclose the manuscript you sent me with a few random comments in the margin. I am in town until the first of next week, and am in touch with Dutton, trying to get an appointment with ol
d John Macrae.”87

  At the beginning of June, a letter from Simon Williamson suggests that he had heard that both Eastman and Dutton had praised the novel. He wrote to McKay: “I am glad that your publisher and the critic liked your manuscript. I believe that it will be a success since it comes at an opportune time of social change, development and disillusion of the Negro.”88 But McKay needed more time. Eastman wrote on June 3 that he was trying to intercede with Dutton in order to convince the publisher to give McKay two more months of support. There is a handwritten, undated note in McKay’s papers in which Eastman informs him that even though the deadline for completion had passed, Dutton had agreed to pay the additional $150 due upon submission as an additional advance, so that McKay could keep working.89 The publisher wrote at the same time to McKay to confirm this arrangement.90 And as late as June 24, 1941, Macrae told McKay that he was “very happy to learn from our mutual friend Max Eastman and from you the splendid progress you have made with your new novel.”91

  By the end of July, McKay had returned to New York. He wrote to another friend, the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten, letting him know that he was “rushing through an important job, which I want to get off my hands + feel free.”92 A week later, it was done; he wrote Eastman on July 28 to tell him that he had finished and turned in the novel:

  DEAR MAX

  I succeeded in getting an old loft on this noisy busy thoroughfare for only $15 a month, no bath, no hot water etc, but it is a big barnlike room and I am glad to have it and hope I can make a little money to pay for it. Instead of working on the duplicate, I decided it was wisest after talking to President Macrae, to pitch in on the original of the manuscript. And so I did and finished and turned it in last Friday. It runs to a little over 300 pages. I should have liked to have more time to polish it up and get in some brighter phrases after resting and refreshing my mind a little, but as I lacked the necessary means I did the next best thing and finished the job to the best of my ability. I might decide to give the dedication to Eliena and you, if it comes through the test all right. I am writing with my fingers crossed.93