Due to the recent release of two formerly unknown novels, McKay is now experiencing something of his own renaissance. Discovered by Jean-Christophe Cloutier and co-edited with his Columbia graduate studies advisor, Brent Hayes Edwards, the circa-1941 Amiable with Big Teeth is a satire set in Harlem during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. When Penguin Classics published the formerly lost text in 2017, the novel generated considerable excitement. It also paved the way for the recovery of the circa-1929–33 Romance in Marseille (two chapters of which were excerpted in LARB in February 2020). Whereas Amiable with Big Teeth was formerly unknown to the world, Romance in Marseille sat on a special collections shelf for some 80 years, its initial containment being largely due to its queer content.
Beyond awarding long overdue attention to McKay, Amiable with Big Teeth and Romance in Marseille provide new contexts for the Harlem Renaissance transgressive novel and, more widely, for modernist fiction in general. McKay’s new old novels demonstrate that unpublishable literary texts may fill a role as significant as works that made it into print, even those that the church and state sought to repress, such as Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. What does the Black modernist future—that is, the Black present—look like when a formerly unread text inserts itself on the scene and thereby radically disrupts and rescripts the known historical narrative—the past-present that contemporary readers have understood to exist?
The arrival of these two novels calls for a new McKay biography that mines how the Harlem Renaissance writer’s sexuality shaped his revolutionary art and radical politics. The classic profile, Wayne F. Cooper’s Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (1987), is now over three decades old. Readers expecting a biographical study that explores the substance of queer imagery in McKay’s writing will be disappointed, however, with historian Winston James’s Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik (2022). By omitting any mention of gay or bisexual themes in McKay’s Jamaican-period poetry, James’s biography imparts the impression that homosexual themes in McKay’s early “nation language” poetry (to use Kamau Brathwaite’s term) do not exist. This “absence” materializes as an erasure: a disregarding of how the Jamaican author’s early sexual metamorphosis informed his aesthetic and shaped the decades of writing to come.