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MORAND, Paul. Black Magic. Translated from the French by Hamish Miles. Illustrated by Aaron Douglas.
New York: The Viking Press, 1929. First edition. Tall 8vo., original cloth backed decorated paper boards, spine label, vi, 218pp. With eight full-page "jazz" style plates by African American Harlem artist Aaron Douglas. Two brown stains ( 9cm x 2cm) on the front pastedown and two stains (5cm x 2cm) on the rear pastedown otherwise a fine copy in the vibrant d/w printed in black, yellow, red and cream, which has a small chip out of the lower edge of the front panel, some slight chipping to the spine ends, and a small hole on the spine affecting the red decoration, but this is a very nice example of this attractive d/w often found with the spine decoration faded away.
Paul Morand [1888-1976], French diplomat, modernist author, supporter of the Vichy government, and self-confessed ‘negrophile', who ‘espoused a reflexive adherence to racial, ethnic, and anti-Semitic ideologies.' Morand published some sixty books of fiction, travel, criticism, and biography. The above title, the first English translation of Magie Noire, is a collection of short stories inspired by his travels, grouped into three sections: U.S.A., West Indies, and Africa. The blurb on the d/w describes the stories as: ‘When Paul Morand tells stories of the modern Negro, he knows his Harlem and his New Orleans-- and he also knows his Haiti, his Paris Underworld, and his Congo. Being a cultivated Frenchman, a traveller and man-of-the-world, he absorbs from any scene he visits all the colour, perfume, light, and motion that it contains, and re-distils them into a superbly effective story... There is a story of Congo, the dancer who was the toast of Paris until the voodoo got her; the story of the Bloom Family, who tried to "pass"; of the heiress who "went native" on a Cooks Tour to Africa; the fantastic tale of a Black emperor in modern Haiti; the native tribal legend of the Eating of the King...'
While Morand's work proved popular with some contemporary audiences, more recent appraisals are quite rightly more circumspect. The entry for Morand in the Encyclopedia of Harlem describes the stories as showing ‘black Africans in Europe and the United States struggling to deal with the changing world, and generally finding themselves incapable of keeping up with whites', while Martin Thomas states they are ‘overtly racist' which ‘etches a thin line separating black peoples from savagery... includes African-American characters typecast as racially inferior, barbaric, and predatory. Their underlying primitivism endures beneath the trappings of Western codes of behaviour.' (Martin Thomas. The French Regime Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society, 2005).
The illustrations by black artist Aaron Douglas, done in a ‘cubist-precisionist' manner, are both striking and evocative. This is especially true of his illustration for the story ‘Charleston' which ‘reproduces a scene familiar from much visual culture and literature of the Jazz Age. Layering silhouetted figures, abstract motifs and geometric patterns, he captures, in its dynamics, a jazz performance in a cabaret. Any celebration of African American cultural vibrancy, however, is cut short by the spectre of racial violence. Douglas introduces a lynching rope into this relaxed scene: using a sharp white line, he positions it at the centre of the painting.' (Rachel Farebrother. The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance, 2009).