by Claude McKay
PENGUIN CLASSICS
ROMANCE IN MARSEILLE
CLAUDE MCKAY (1889–1948), born Festus Claudius McKay, is widely regarded as one of the most important literary and political writers of the interwar period and the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Jamaica, he moved to the United States in 1912 to study at the Tuskegee Institute. In 1928, he published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won a Harmon Foundation award for literature. He also published two other novels, Banjo and Banana Bottom, as well as a collection of short stories, Gingertown, two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica, and a work of nonfiction, Harlem: Negro Metropolis. His Complete Poems were published posthumously, and in 1977 he was named the national poet of Jamaica.
GARY EDWARD HOLCOMB is professor of African American Literature and Studies in the Department of African American Studies at Ohio University. His books are Teaching Hemingway and Race (2018), Hemingway and the Black Renaissance (2012), and Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (2007), a study that includes a chapter devoted to Romance in Marseille.
WILLIAM J. MAXWELL is professor of English and African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (2015), which won the American Book Award in 2016, and New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (1999). He is the editor of James Baldwin: The FBI File (2017) and Claude McKay’s Complete Poems (2004).
Claude McKay, 1926. Photographed by Berenice Abbott / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / Getty Images.
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Copyright © 2020 by The Literary Estate for the Works of Claude McKay
Introduction and supplemental materials copyright © 2020 by Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell
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This page: page 26 of typescript titled “Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay” from the Claude McKay Collection owned by the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, is used with the permission of the Literary Estate for the Works of Claude McKay.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: McKay, Claude, 1890–1948, author. | Holcomb, Gary Edward, writer of introduction. | Maxwell, William J. (College teacher), writer of introduction.
Title: Romance in Marseille / Claude McKay ; introduction by Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell.
Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019025262 (print) | LCCN 2019025263 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143134220 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525505983 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3525.A24785 R66 2020 (print) | LCC PS3525.A24785 (ebook) | DDC 813/.52—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025262
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025263
Cover illustration: Sean Qualls
pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
Contents
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction by GARY EDWARD HOLCOMB and WILLIAM J. MAXWELL
A Note on the Text
ROMANCE IN MARSEILLE
First Part
Second Part
Third Part
Suggestions for Further Reading
Explanatory Notes
Introduction
New readers are advised that this introduction makes details of the plot explicit.
Visiting Barcelona in September 1929, Claude McKay (1889–1948), one of the earliest stars of the Harlem Renaissance, set to work on a novel he then called “The Jungle and the Bottoms.” Seven years earlier, during the annus mirabilis he shared with Ulysses, The Waste Land, and Jacob’s Room, the Jamaican-born, hard-traveling McKay had published the Harlem movement’s first substantial book of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922), in New York. Six years after that, his first novel, Home to Harlem (1928), had enjoyed multiple printings as the Harlem Renaissance’s first certified American bestseller. Launching “The Jungle and the Bottoms” in Spain in the autumn of the stock market crash, however, an author recognized for originality planned to rework already covered material. As McKay initially sketched it, his new book would recycle both the Marseille dockside setting and the loose, picaresque storytelling of his second novel, Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (1929), a rambling tale of black life led as “a dream of vagabondage.”1 Yet within months he was rethinking “The Jungle and the Bottoms” wholesale, aiming to break with Banjo by drafting an uncluttered, linear plot combining his rowdy troupe of sailors, dockworkers, and filles de joie—collectively straight and queer, disabled and able-bodied, African, European, Caribbean, and American.
In the summer of 1930, following transatlantic debates with his New York publisher and Paris literary agent over the merits of the novel, McKay lost his enthusiasm for this story with a plot, and set the manuscript aside. Hoping he could salvage the work, he took it up again in 1932, the interracial history and fluid sexual landscape of his new home of Morocco spurring a return to the raw miscellany of his “Jungle.” Adding scores of pages and an operatically violent ending, McKay restyled the novel as “Savage Loving,” a title calculated to attract the carnal imagination and the sales figures he had not earned since Home to Harlem. But a now ill and impoverished author again faced editorial obstacles, not to mention harassment from British consular agents and French colonial administrators suspicious of his doings around Tangier’s International Zone. By the time he abandoned the project for good in the Great Depression depths of 1933, he had given the completed novel its least sensational and most place-bound name, Romance in Marseille. (In another break from Banjo, McKay finally preferred the de-Anglicized French spelling of the city without a final s, fulfilling his self-description as a cosmopolitan “bad nationalist.”2) Whatever the politics of its orthography, what you hold in your hands or read on your screen is the first version of Romance in Marseille published in any form, anywhere. After nearly ninety years in waiting, this descendant of “The Jungle and the Bottoms” and “Savage Loving” has escaped its tangled transnational composition history to make its public debut. McKay’s legacy will never look the same, and neither will the Harlem Renaissance, Black Atlantic modernism, Caribbean postcolonialism, twentieth-century LGBTQ writing, the Lost Generation, and the radical novel between the world wars. Above all, perhaps, our understanding of the literature of disability will need to account for a strange and absorbing new view of colonial racism and the heritage of European slavery as triggers of physical impairment.
Although its population of roving and loving black workers ensures its f
amily resemblance to Home to Harlem and Banjo, Romance in Marseille stands apart from all five of McKay’s previously published novels, two of them, Harlem Glory (1990) and Amiable with Big Teeth (2017), also recovered after his early death. Most distinctively, it places an acutely disabled African at the heart of its lean but eventful three-part narrative. Romance’s male lead, Lafala, has next to nothing in common with the traditional literary character marked by a physical disability, the angelic icon or spectacular alien confined to a book’s margins and obliged to draw pity and horror from its major players. Lafala instead serves as McKay’s never freakish, rarely saintly protagonist, a sailor born in an unspecified part of English West Africa who seeks self-respect after his betrayal by Aslima, a black Moroccan prostitute he falls for in the Mediterranean port of Marseille sometime in the 1920s. Fighting “self-disgust”3 with quick action, he ditches the city Alexandre Dumas dubbed “the meeting place of the entire world”4 and stows away on a ship to New York, expecting that his dark complexion will allow him “to escape detection in the gloominess of the bunker.”5 But he is discovered and forced from his hiding place, and jailed in a freezing toilet. Badly frostbitten by the time the boat docks, the once-nimble dancer loses both of his lower legs, emerging from life-saving surgery as what he terms “an amputated man.”6
Thanks to a successful lawsuit against the shipping line, however, the down-for-the-count Lafala scores big in the litigious United States. Anticipating Toni Morrison’s one-legged, insurance-enriched character Eva Peace, the matriarch of the black “Bottom” neighborhood in the novel Sula (1973), he schemes to convert stolen mobility into social ascent. Feeling flush after his legal payout, and tempted “like all vain humanity who love to revisit the scenes of their sufferings and defeats after they have conquered their world,”7 Lafala doubles back to Marseille and resumes his liaison with Aslima, who had fleeced and jilted him. Though now a wealthy local “personage”8 equipped for a leisurely life in the Vieux Port’s “caves and dens,”9 he finds his troubles far from over, his affair with Aslima complicated by more than his double amputation and the lurking presence of her covetous pimp. Adding another coat of irony to the “Pyrrhic victory”10 of limbs traded for gold, the shipping line conspires with French police to imprison Lafala for the unforgiven offense of stowing away for profit. To McKay’s unnamed maritime company, a messenger of Europe’s greed for obedient black bodies, the African’s extremities are insufficient sacrifice. By the novel’s end, an international crew of mostly black allies, led by a McKay-like Caribbean intellectual, has set Lafala free once more, easing his return to his native land. But the good fortune he brings back to West Africa does not include Aslima’s companionship. While Lafala keeps his African birthright, he sells his healing intraracial romance for a pile of dollars.
Flanking its pivotal affair between two representative Africans, McKay’s jazz- and beguine-soaked narrative is stocked with memorable supporting actors. The matter-of-factly gay longshoreman Big Blonde joins Lafala in standing out against McKay’s typical cast list. This strapping and unrepressed white American qualifies as a different kind of Lost Generation expatriate. Queerly reminiscent of “a hero straight out of Joseph Conrad,”11 he is “an outstanding enigma” of the Marseille docks, rumored to “have once held a respectable position in the merchant service” and to employ the Casbah-like “Quayside” district as a hideout besides a pleasure den. Unlike Conrad’s similarly strong and inscrutable Lord Jim, however, Big Blonde’s legend is fed by his instinctive socialism, unorganizable though it may be. Among the outsized laborer’s co-conspirators is the writer and Communist recruiter Etienne St. Dominique, a “mulatto from Martinique”12 who leverages his “cultivated accent and his refined manners”13 on Lafala’s behalf when he lands in jail. Big Blonde’s “Little Brother” and younger lover is Petit Frère, “fascinating with his pale prettiness”14 and always eager for a good meal and a taste of intrigue. Still another queer figure, the single well-developed lesbian character in McKay’s work, is the independent black courtesan La Fleur Noire (“the Black Flower”), who connives against Aslima, her only worthy rival in the Vieux Port sex trade. In one of Romance’s concluding episodes, La Fleur’s antipathy toward Aslima is revealed as camouflage for admiration and desire. Throughout the novel, forms of queer love suggested or sidelined in McKay’s previous fiction are drawn in bold strokes and allowed to intrude on Lafala and Aslima’s central passion.
The genesis of Romance in Marseille is as distinctive as its dramatis personae. McKay derived the novel’s outline from an acquaintance’s experience of shattering amputation and extraordinary recovery. Even before he wrote the first page, McKay identified the model for Lafala as Nelson Simeon Dede, a Nigerian seaman he had befriended in Marseille. A minor character influenced by Dede also appears in Banjo, to some extent a roman à clef of McKay’s nomadic circle in the south of France. In this earlier Marseille-set novel, Dede takes the form of a race-proud Nigerian named Taloufa, a talented guitarist and “good luck baby”15 who stows away to America without a hitch. When embarking on Romance, McKay gave his disabled protagonist this same name.16 As the drafts mounted, “Taloufa” morphed into “Lafala,” the latter a would-be Africanism, perhaps repurposed from Ruwaili Arabic, just a short distance from the former in sound and syllable. McKay had been introduced to Lafala’s template, the flesh-and-blood Dede, during his first visit to Marseille in 1926. He reencountered him in January 1928, after Dede had stowed away, been captured, suffered the loss of both feet, unexpectedly won restitution, and returned to the city’s teeming, low-lying “Bottoms” with prostheses and a wad of cash. In a February 1928 letter to his literary agent,17 William Aspenwall Bradley, McKay excitedly discussed his Nigerian friend’s wildly mixed “fortune and misfortune.”18 His next novel would cast the paradoxical drama of the abruptly disabled yet suddenly prosperous stowaway as a key to the modern African diaspora.
* * *
• • •
The 1920s, the high season of the Jazz Age, the New Negro, the Harlem Renaissance, and the so-called Negro Vogue, was also the era of the high seas black stowaway. The decade that liberated millions from the mechanized slaughter of the Great War became “a time of universal excitement,”19 as Romance in Marseille explains it, and “even among Negroes there were signs of a stirring and from the New World a dark cry of ‘Back to Africa’ came over the air.” The blooming desire of New World blacks for reconnection with Africa, and of Africans for reconnection with their New and Old World kin, assumed many institutional forms. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), complete with tens of thousands of uniformed members and its own Black Star steamship line, was the most popular, the most spectacular, and finally the most tragic of these. But practically every month of the 1920s brought news of individual black men slipping onto ships, risking limb and liberty to sail in various international directions and bend Garvey’s seafaring vision to their own designs.
In April 1923, for example, the Baltimore Afro-American reported on the brave and angry stowaway of Battling Siki, a Senegalese boxing champion. Marooned in Ireland after a bout “because both American and British ships refused to haul him home,” the light heavyweight crept onto a “small cargo boat” heading from Dublin to Le Havre. Strength derived from “righteous indignation,”20 Siki affirmed, delivered him securely to France. Five years later, in August 1928, the Afro-American told the roguish tale of Sherlock and O. Granville Grinage, a pair of black brothers from Maryland who stole “aboard a merchant marine vessel” headed to “the Pacific Coast.” On their way through the Panama Canal and across California, the latter by car, they met with “thrills which would give inspiration to an O. Henry,”21 the famous American author of plot-twisting stories. Earlier that summer, the New York Amsterdam News relished “the adventuresome experience of Frank Murray Byrd,”22 a Harlem student discovered on the Berengaria, a luxurious transatlantic Cunard liner, “sitting in the first-class library
writing in his diary.” Another Amsterdam News item painted Byrd as a colorful dandy despite his lack of a paid fare, a beau on a budget tossed into an English jail “in pearl spats, a soigné purple suit, a velour hat, yellow suede shoes, sauterne chamois gloves, a pink shirt, a claret cravat, and a lavender topcoat.”23
Closer to the end of the decade, African American papers devoted columns to a stowaway saga mixed up with another adventurous Byrd. Robert White Lanier, a black teenager from Jersey City, had packed up a camera, “hired a rowboat, dodged the police patrol,”24 and sneaked under cover of night into the forecastle of Commander Richard Byrd’s flagship in New York Harbor. Lanier’s well-prepared aim was to join Byrd’s expedition to Antarctica and become the first black man to reach the South Pole. Disregarding the achievement of black explorer Matthew Henson, the first man of any color to leave footprints on the North Pole, Byrd dropped Lanier off in Panama, deciding that he “lacked the stamina necessary to withstand the rigors of an Antarctic voyage.”25 “I’m a lad that’s always been righteous. They’re jealous of my upcoming. They don’t want to see me get ahead,”26 Lanier protested to the Chicago Defender. Lanier never surmounted either pole, but he gained his portion of fame as the most determined black stowaway profiled in a long journalistic series. Stylishly and unapologetically hijacking the means of nautical transportation was one dependable route to press attention in the years when “the Negro mind,”27 as W. E. B. Du Bois had it, reached out “to know, to sympathize, to inquire” beyond national borders.
In addition to the true story of Nelson Simeon Dede, other more-or-less nonfictional tales of ocean tramping filtered into Romance in Marseille. McKay, an eager if cynical reader of the African American press even while globetrotting in Western Europe and North Africa, supplied Romance with related yarns of black wanderers lighting out without tickets, passports, or portfolios, relying on their wits alone to ply the Atlantic and the deep-water port of Marseille. Close to the heart of McKay’s Romance, in fact, is a set of searching, big-picture questions suggested by the whole body of New Negro stowaway tales. Can black internationalism flourish as a personal, even erotic attachment in the absence of studied Pan-Africanist convictions? Can black selves return to Africa, spiritually or otherwise, without the benefit of Garveyism, Communism, or other collective movements capable of raising armies, purchasing steamships, and resettling formerly colonized lands? Can reparations for past centuries of racial slavery and for the ongoing plunder of black working bodies somehow be earned on a case-by-case basis, and, if so, would these reparations implant incurable materialism in those granted them? Finally, can the modern reunion of the peoples of the black diaspora, dispersed and wounded by the violence of slavery and imperialism, be plotted as a changeable, passionate romance instead of a resolute political epic? Du Bois, McKay’s fiercest critic among the African American intelligentsia, once characterized Banjo as “a sort of international philosophy of the Negro race.”28 Had he been able to read Romance in Marseille, he might have typed it as an international philosophy of a race reconsidered as a network of broad-minded, love-driven, but ultimately detached individuals.
