12 - Banjo meets the Dark Princess: Claude McKay, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the transnational novel of the Harlem Renaissance

Summary

The most notorious bad review of the Harlem Renaissance peaks with an upset stomach and an itch for soap. In an installment of his regular “Browsing Reader” column in The Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois accused Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) of being nasty, brutish, too long, and largely unhygienic. “[F]or the most part,” Du Bois confessed, McKay's bestselling novel “nauseates me, and after the dirtiest parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Several features of Home to Harlem inspired this unusually embodied instance of reader response criticism. The novel fed the lechery of debased white bohemians, charged Du Bois, a smart set eager to project its own fantasies of “utter licentiousness” onto “black Harlem,” and powerful enough within the New York publishing industry to do so in wide public view. McKay satisfied this small but influential constituency for transracial pornography with rare skill, Du Bois allowed, summoning “every art and emphasis to paint drunkenness, fighting, lascivious sexual promiscuity and utter absence of restraint in as bold and as bright colors as he can.” Yet gilding the lily of decadence did not make for lean, harmoniously integrated fiction. Home to Harlem was “padded,” deprived of a logical plot or “any artistic unity.” It cried out for a well-wrought, well-scrubbed sequel free from a “dirty subject” and supplied with a “strong, well-knit as well as beautiful theme.” Before any such sequel was forthcoming, Du Bois' review inspired a blistering private letter from McKay. Questioning the elder statesman's basic credentials as a critic and author of mimetic fiction, McKay mockingly pitied Du Bois' removal from “real life” forced by his role as a racial advocate.