by Claude McKay
As we now know, crossing his fingers wasn’t enough; the book was never published and what was apparently the only copy somehow disappeared. In a rather bittersweet twist of fate, the very day he turned in the novel to Dutton (“last Friday,” he says), on July 25, 1941, McKay sat down for a series of beautiful portraits by Van Vechten, the last he would ever take of McKay. Viewed with the knowledge that McKay had just submitted Amiable with Big Teeth, these portraits now take on a new, affective dimension: the photographs capture a mature, smiling McKay, bearing what may be the look of a man who has the satisfaction of having just completed a monumental endeavor.
For all intents and purposes, the July 28 letter from McKay to Eastman is where the Amiable archival trail ends. There is no further correspondence in the Dutton files, and the next exchange between McKay and Eastman conserved in their papers does not occur until the following summer. The only logical conclusion is that Dutton decided to reject the manuscript. As is standard practice with most publishers, Dutton did not keep files relating to rejected manuscripts, or any documentation of the deliberation process.
McKay never wrote about his apparently brief interaction with Samuel Roth, and it goes unmentioned in the voluminous scholarship on McKay’s work. The earliest evidence we have of the encounter between the two dates from September 11, 1941—in other words, roughly a month after the Dutton deal collapsed. It is a signed copy of Roth’s book of poems, Europe: A Book for America (first published in 1919), which Roth gave to McKay and inscribed: “For Claude McKay with the unqualified admiration of Samuel Roth.”94 We do not know how they met, although they were both left-leaning intellectuals with many acquaintances in common in the modernist literary and political worlds of the interwar period (such as Max Eastman, Louise Bryant, Frank Harris, Maxwell Bodenheim, and Harry Roskolenko).
Two months after completing Amiable with Big Teeth, McKay entered discussions with Roth concerning the ghostwriting of a book to be called “Descent into Harlem” (see “A Note on the Text”).95 But there is no indication that McKay ever began to work on the project. It seems likely that during those negotiations, McKay gave Roth the typescript of Amiable with Big Teeth, perhaps as an example of his recent work, or perhaps as an additional potential publication. McKay never retrieved the novel, however, and neither he nor Roth seems to have spoken or written about it publicly again.
When McKay wrote to Max Eastman again in July 1942, a full year had passed since their last correspondence. He even noted the long delay and said by way of explanation that he had been “dangerously ill.”96 Wayne Cooper notes that in late 1941, McKay’s health “finally collapsed,” due to a persistent flu as well as high blood pressure, heart disease, and many years of poor nutrition. Indeed, McKay would never fully recover from these ailments. In early 1942, McKay was penniless, ill, and discouraged, writing to Ruth Raphael: “I have not done much work of any value since I wrote my last book. In fact I became so broke that I took a menial job to keep myself going.”97 Sometime that winter, another of McKay’s friends, the writer Ellen Tarry, found him “alone and seriously ill in a Harlem rooming house” and helped him receive medical attention through Friendship House, the Catholic social agency.98 In an undated, handwritten letter, McKay expressed his gratitude to Simon Williamson for helping him to pay his rent and eventually helping him move: “you had attended to me through my worst illness,” McKay writes.99 His illness was so debilitating that he left all his belongings behind; as he explains to his former landlord: “because of my illness, [I have] been forced to move to my present address. In fact my condition has been of such a nature until it was impossible for me to get out of the house and get the remainder of my things and return your keys.”100
It may seem surprising to us now, thinking of McKay as a major twentieth-century author, but it is entirely possible that McKay—given his impecunious and peripatetic existence as a self-professed “vagabond poet” for much of his life—lost track of Amiable with Big Teeth, as he had lost or misplaced other book contracts and manuscripts he had written but been unable to publish over the years. When Catherine Latimer wrote to McKay in early 1941 asking if he would be willing to contribute manuscripts to the Schomburg collection at the New York Public Library, he replied that “many of the original ones are lost and others scattered here and there. . . . I have not been careless about them, but one loses manuscripts in packing and moving, sometimes one makes the mistake of throwing out valuable items with trash.”101 In a 1947 letter to his agent Carl Cowl, McKay explained why he no longer had any of his book contracts:
I lost the Harcourt, Brace contract years ago. I left it in my trunk when I went abroad and never got back the trunk from Nancy Markhoff. And I have none of my other contracts. I put them in storage when I was in New York. And when Dorothy Day sent the books to me here all the contracts (even the one with Dutton’s) had disappeared and some other valuable items.102
If Amiable with Big Teeth had consumed McKay’s undivided attention in the spring of 1941, perhaps it fell by the wayside the following winter as he struggled to regain his health and turned to other projects. Although McKay kept writing through the 1940s, his correspondence does not evidence any inclination to return to previous prose projects that had remained unfinished or unpublished, such as “Romance in Marseilles” (written around 1930), “Harlem Glory” (written around 1936–37), and Amiable with Big Teeth. It is perhaps worth recalling, too, that this is the same writer who in 1927 burned the manuscript of his very first try at fiction, “Color Scheme.”103 As is the case with many artists, McKay seems to have always kept his eye on the next project, rather than brooding over the ones that did not come to fruition, for whatever reason.
When Ivie Jackman wrote to McKay in the fall of 1943, asking him to contribute material for what would become the Countee Cullen/Harold Jackman Memorial Collection at Atlanta University, McKay replied that aside from a number of letters from James Weldon Johnson related to the Negro Writers’ Guild, “the only other thing I have here is a novel which I was to work over some day and this is the only copy.”104 He doesn’t say whether the manuscript in question is the single copy of Amiable with Big Teeth or one of his other unpublished works. But to the best of our knowledge, the archives provide no further reference to Amiable with Big Teeth until the typescript resurfaces in the Samuel Roth Papers in 2009.
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE CLOUTIER AND BRENT HAYES EDWARDS
Suggestions for Further Reading
WORKS BY CLAUDE MCKAY
Banana Bottom (1933). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1974.
Banjo (1929). New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1957.
Complete Poems. Edited by William Maxwell. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2004.
Gingertown. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932.
Harlem Glory: A Fragment of Aframerican Life. Edited by Carl Cowl. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1990.
Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968.
Home to Harlem (1928). Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987.
A Long Way from Home (1937). New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1970.
My Green Hills of Jamaica and Five Jamaican Short Stories. Edited by Mervyn Morris. Kingston: Heinemann, 1979.
The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912–1948. Edited by Wayne F. Cooper. New York: Schocken Books, 1973.
SECONDARY CRITICISM
Asante, S. K. B. Pan-African Protest: West Africa and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis, 1934–1941. London: Longman, 1977.
Cloutier, Jean-Christophe. “Amiable with Big Teeth: The Case of Claude McKay’s Last Novel.” Modernism/modernity 20, no. 3 (September 2013): 557–76.
Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay, Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Ri
se of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Fronczak, Joseph. “Local People’s Global Politics: A Transnational History of the Hands Off Ethiopia Movement of 1935.” Diplomatic History 39, no. 2 (2015): 245.
Gertzman, Jay. Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013.
Harris, Joseph. African-American Reactions to the War in Ethiopia, 1936–1941. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.
Hirsch, Jerrold. Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Jackson, Lawrence P. The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
James, Winston. A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion. London: Verso, 2000.
———. Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America. London: Verso, 1999.
Kelley, Robin D. G. “‘This Ain’t Ethiopia, but It’ll Do’: African Americans and the Spanish Civil War.” In Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, 123–58. New York: Free Press, 1994.
Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
Makalani, Minkah. In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Maxwell, William J. New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Plummer, Brenda Gayle. Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Robinson, Cedric J. “The African Diaspora and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis.” Race & Class 27, no. 2 (1985): 51–65.
Scott, William R. “Malaku E. Bayen: Ethiopian Emissary to Black America, 1936–1941.” Ethiopia Observer 15, no. 2 (1972): 132–37.
———. The Sons of Sheba’s Race: African-Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1941. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Tillery, Tyrone. Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Von Eschen, Penny M. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism, 1937–1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
A Note on the Text
This is the first publication of the typescript of Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem, which was found in 2009 by Jean-Christophe Cloutier as he was processing the Samuel Roth Papers in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. This typescript (MS 1643, Box 29, Folders 7–8) appears to be the only extant copy of Amiable with Big Teeth.
There are two sets of handwritten edits in the 314-page typescript. One set of edits, which runs through the entire duration of the novel, appears to be McKay’s own, given the striking similarity of the handwriting with McKay’s revisions in the typescripts of two of his other unpublished novels, “Romance in Marseilles” (composed c. 1930) and “Harlem Glory” (composed c. 1936–37), both held in the McKay Collection (Sc MG 19) in the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. The second set of handwritten edits, which only runs through the first fifty-six pages of the novel, and then again on the final few pages of the typescript, appears to have been made by Samuel Roth, given their similarity to his writing elsewhere in the Roth Papers.
Unless otherwise indicated in the Explanatory Notes, this edition follows all of the handwritten revisions by McKay, but not those by Roth. Other minor misspellings and typographical errors have been silently emended, and the book has been lightly edited for felicity and consistency (in particular, some punctuation has been edited for the sake of clarity; and a few words that are spelled variously in the typescript—which uses both “School-teacher” and “schoolteacher,” for example—have been standardized). Otherwise this edition maintains the original formatting in McKay’s typescript, except that all words that were underlined in the typescript (most often to indicate emphasis in spoken dialogue) have been rendered in italics.
In the Roth Papers, the McKay manuscript is one of dozens of manuscripts by other authors that Roth kept in uniform black binders. The label on the binder cover gives a slight variation (in a different typeface) of the novel’s subtitle: “A Novel Concerning the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Black Sheep of Harlem.” This edition retains McKay’s original subtitle as given on the title page of the typescript itself inside the black binder.
Also originally inserted in the black binder with the Amiable with Big Teeth typescript was a one-page “Publisher’s Note,” presumably written by Roth. This note was composed in a different typeface from the novel itself and is at times factually incorrect: for example, it dates the Italo-Ethiopian War as having taken place in “the Twenties” (whereas in fact the conflict started in October 1935 and ended in May 1936) and states that McKay wrote the novel “just before his death” (whereas in fact he composed it in the spring of 1941). It is thus likely that Roth drafted the “Publisher’s Note” at some point after McKay’s death in 1948, perhaps in the hope of releasing the book posthumously in order to capitalize on the fame of the writer the “Note” describes as “Harlem’s most distinguished novelist.”
The binder in the Roth Papers also contained a three-page typewritten document entitled “Proem.” It is written in grammatically flawed English and narrated in the first person. (The “Proem” opens: “At the end of my junior year I quit the High School. I did because I was excited to radical change. It offered a chance for voyages, to see strange places and different people.”) It is also narrated in the voice of a self-described “young white man” who, after traveling the world, returns to New York City in 1929. In other words, there is no connection between this document and the narrative of Amiable with Big Teeth aside from the fact that Roth retained them in the same binder. By all evidence, this “Proem” appears to be an initial draft of “Descent into Harlem,” the book Roth hired McKay to ghostwrite for an Italian-American named Dante Cacici in the early fall of 1941, but which McKay does not seem to have ever undertaken or completed. Because the “Proem” is a fragmentary artifact from another book project and not an integral part of Amiable with Big Teeth (which, as explained in the Introduction, McKay had written months before Roth hired him to work on “Descent into Harlem”), it has not been included in this edition. Both the “Publisher’s Note” and the “Proem” are kept with the original typescript of the novel in Box 29 of the Samuel Roth Papers.
The Ethiop Gods have Ethiop lips,
Bronze cheeks and woolly hair;
The Grecian Gods are like the Greeks,
As keen-eyed, cold, and fair.
—Walter Bagehot1
The Leading Characters
Lij Tekla Alamaya
An Envoy from Ethiopia
Pablo Peixota
Chairman of the Hands to Ethiopia
Maxim Tasan
Mysterious Person Identified with the White Friends of Ethiopia
Newton Castle
Secretary of the Hands to Ethiopia and Friend of Maxim Tasan
Dorsey Flagg
Executive Member of the Hands to Ethiopia
Kezia Peixota
Wife of Pablo
Seraphine Peixota
Daughter of Kezia
Gloria Kendall
Employee of the White Friends of Ethiopia
Rev. Zebulon Trawl
Executive Member of the Hands to Ethiopia
Professor Koazhy
Leader of the Senegambians
1
“. . . ETHIOPIA SHALL SOON STRETCH OUT HER HANDS TO GOD.”
—Psalms 68:311
From 110th to 140th Street, Seventh Avenue on this pleasant Sunday afternoon was a grandly tumultuous parade ground. The animated crowds pushed over the jammed sidewalks into the street. Every stoop was pre-empted by eager groups of youngsters struggling to hold their places and warding off newcomers. Above, the tri-color green-yellow-red of Ethiopia blazoned from many windows. Streamers were thrown at the marchers and confetti fluttered in the air like colored moths. With bands and banners and pompous feet the procession undulated along the avenue. There were Elks and Masons and other fraternal orders, political and religious organizations, social clubs and study clubs—the Ethiopian Students Class, the African Historical Society, the Senegambian Scouts,2 Ladies’ Auxiliaries, children’s groups. At intervals resounding claps rewarded some section which attracted special attention by a piece of meretricious music or movement. Near the corner where the procession went down a side street to the church, a huge banner floated over the avenue, bearing the motto: WELCOME TO THE PRINCE OF ETHIOPIA: ENVOY OF HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY.
