Romance in Marseille

by Claude McKay

  But why and how did McKay begin Romance in Marseille in the first place? What in addition to the fates of Jonathan Gibson and Nelson Simeon Dede and the stowaway era in black cultural life fueled and shaped the book? After the success of Home to Harlem in 1928, his only large literary payday, McKay was disappointed when Banjo, his Marseillais novel of 1929, sold sluggishly.58 Rallying his pride, however, McKay was seized by the idea of a second novel set mostly in the Vieux Port, believing he had something to add on the subject of the international guild of black sailors and dockworkers gathered in France’s second city. “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” as it was first called, was conceived as another diffuse Marseille bouillabaisse, and it initially reworked material once intended for Banjo. But McKay then found himself aspiring to a narrative style different from either of his two previous novels. In Banjo and Home to Harlem, he had spun discursive and digressive yarns, wheeling characters in to argue, sometimes at chapter length, from assorted national and ideological perspectives. In both of these novels, in fact, the persona of Ray, a Wordsworth-quoting Haitian political exile, spoke transparently for his Jamaican émigré creator. In “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” McKay would fashion an intellectually provocative but less talky and idea-driven narrative, pointing a brighter spotlight at the actions and psychology of the restless black men he had encountered in Marseille. At the same time, he would venture beyond the spontaneous black male communities of his first two novels to envision Aslima along with her complex black lesbian counterpart, La Fleur, and the compelling white longshoreman, Big Blonde. Most unusually, McKay parted from the effortless ramblers of his earlier fiction to flesh out a protagonist who confronts a serious bodily disability. Reversing Banjo’s subtitle, “The Jungle and the Bottoms” would be a love story including a plot, a fully peopled, dramatically sequenced romance steered by a physically challenged African hero and his wholehearted “burning brown”59 mistress.

  Stopping in Barcelona in September 1929, McKay wrote the novel’s first words, and by December he had enough pages to solicit the opinion of his eminent literary agent.60 William Aspenwall Bradley, praised by Gertrude Stein as the foremost “friend and comforter of Paris writers,”61 responded with reservations, most of all about the supposedly unsympathetic treatment of the protagonist, at that time still called Taloufa. Essentially agreeing with Bradley’s concern that the new novel replicated Banjo’s discursive style, McKay replied in turn by emphasizing his intent to “tackle Taloufa’s story in another form”62 and “make a difficult thing of it,”63 adding greater suspense and intricacy. McKay also assured Bradley that the novel would be notably different from the two that came before it. For one thing, he would dispense with an obvious alter ego, eventually landing on the better-disguised mouthpiece of Etienne St. Dominique, his last name evoking Saint-Domingue, the French colony that became the black republic of Haiti, and thus a reminder of the long, not-just-personal history of black revolution. “You see there is [not] and won’t be any Ray in the tale,” McKay guaranteed, since he “realized that the form was very awkward and that some of my best scenes, the love ones for instance, would be stifled by it.”64 St. Dominique’s divergence from Ray/McKay is reinforced by his resemblance to another historical figure, the Senegalese Communist and black nationalist Lamine Senghor (1889–1927). McKay’s A Long Way from Home cordially recalls his friendship with this founder of the radical Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre—and distinguishes him from the better-remembered Négritude poet and Senegalese politician Léopold Sédar Senghor. “This Senghor,” McKay clarifies, “was a tall, lean intelligent Senegalese and his ideas were a mixture of African nationalism and international Communism. Senghor was interested in my writing and said he wished I would write the truth about the Negroes in Marseilles. I promised him I would some day [sic].”65 “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” McKay’s second crack at fulfilling this promise, sprinkles Lamine Senghor’s left-nationalist opinions into its comparatively unforced political dialogue. It also memorializes his patronage of Marseille’s Communist-sponsored “International Seamen’s Building,”66 renamed the “Seamen’s Club” in Romance’s final draft.67

  McKay took much less kindly to his agent’s recommendation that he show his novel’s disabled protagonist in a more pitying light. “Primarily I am not writing a sentimental story about Taloufa,” he instructed Bradley. His hero was no Dickensian puppet of lamed innocence, and to make him “extremely acceptable I should have to write a real sob-sister story and that I just cannot do.”68 Softening the tenor and language of Taloufa’s less-than-angelic reactions to his disability would betray not only the character’s humanity, but also the novel’s racial distinctiveness, McKay suggested, which he meant to present without special pleading. Implicitly tangling with Du Bois, a sworn enemy of Home to Harlem’s “filth”69 who controversially preached that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be,”70 McKay insisted on the naturalness and political ingenuousness of Taloufa’s racy speech. Of that and other frankly “racial stuff in the story,”71 McKay told Bradley, “I felt that that came naturally as the talk and thought of the Negroes, giving a peculiar and definite color to the human story. I never thought of it as propaganda nor felt even the happy-go-lucky Negro does not think and feel and talk that way.”

  Interestingly, McKay’s response to Bradley’s letter also lays out his blueprint for shaping Taloufa’s trajectory into a “problem novel.” As McKay understood the genre, such a novel would be less a muckraking exposé of a social crisis than an articulate study of socially molded intellectual and psychological tensions. “I don’t think a good problem novel of Negro life should not be written,” McKay enjoined. “I will admit that perhaps Taloufa’s state of mind and my analysis of it do not go with the picaresque story—but if I am to go on as a writer my characters beside acting must think and talk some sense. . . .”72 In this way, diving deep into Taloufa’s motivations, some of them less than noble, the novel could air both the racial particularity and interracial universality of his unstable experience. Taloufa’s “character is changed by his fortune—but that is also a common human thing. [He] excuses himself because he has been amputated but that is also the common human trick.”73 His protagonist’s tricky human psychology, moreover, would not crowd out a vivid storyline. McKay repeatedly warned himself off a shaggy narrative, instead diagramming arcs and plot points: “The climax comes when Taloufa is arrested just when he was about to slip away” and his comrades “have to try to get him freed.”74 In another, June 1930 letter to longtime friend and mentor Max Eastman, McKay distinguished “The Jungle and the Bottoms” as “a real story with something of a plot, involving a West African young man (who had lost his legs stowing away and received good compensation through the efforts of an ambulance chaser) and a North African Negroid girl. They two represent the ‘jungle’ in the ‘bottoms’ that the girl, who is a whore there, wants to leave to go back to Africa with the man.”75

  McKay’s apologia for his infant novel was extensive, foreshadowing the many obstacles it would confront on the way to completion. Nine months after his initial letter vindicating “The Jungle and the Bottoms” to Bradley, he was back at its defense, answering his agent’s persistent worry that it was Banjo redux. This time out, McKay pledged to Bradley that he was structuring a narrative “very different in style and mood,”76 with characters “more fully realized”77 than any he had conceived previously. “As the book is a more serious attempt than the others and will set the tone for future work,” McKay maintained, “I should like to make it as perfect as I can.”78 Making it perfect, at this stage of the game, involved veiling pieces of its unmistakable Marseille scenery. The final draft of “The Jungle and the Bottoms” refers to the city as “Dreamport,”79 and the Vieux Port, the culturally subterranean precinct of Marseille where his characters roam and clash, as the “Bottoms.” A candid explanation of the Dreamport contrivance appears in McKay’s June 1930 letter to Eastman: “The scene is the same as ‘Ban
jo,’ but I call the town Dreamport as it might have been any of six European ports.”80

  Though insincere about his setting, McKay was in earnest about the fuller realization of his characters. For the first time, his fiction regularly turned to focus on well-rounded though hypersexualized female actors. La Fleur Noire enters “The Jungle and the Bottoms” as the most-desired and most-fêted black escort in Marseille. She is equally “small and straight”81 and strong-willed, autonomous enough to carve a path without a pimp despite her likeness to “a new-fangled doll done in dark-brown wax.”82 La Fleur’s defining enemy, Aslima, nicknamed “the Tigress,” is a Quayside prostitute who learns to love Taloufa/Lafala without mercenary reservation. Glowingly “stout and full of an abundance of earthly sap and compact of inexhaustible energy in spite of the grinding waste of it,”83 her appearance cleanly divides her from La Fleur while sounding a related note of three-dimensional self-contradiction. Laboring on his initial draft, an animated McKay notified Bradley that Aslima (“Zhima” in a now-lost, initial version) was flourishing of her own accord and taking control of the narrative, its author included: “the Arab girl is growing bigger than I ever dreamed and running away with the book and me.”84 Further down the road of composition, Aslima took possession of the book’s final chapter, scene, and paragraph, her martyrdom reorienting the meaning of Lafala’s rags-to-riches return to Africa, at last glance a kind of solo Garveyism purchased at an excessive price.

  Another sign of the complexity of La Fleur’s character is her unashamed lesbianism. When it comes to the business of sex, and the points of pride derived from it, La Fleur and Aslima vie for Lafala’s trade and devotion, forming a prototypical novelistic love triangle. In a not-uncommon eroticizing of disability, the two desmoiselles de Marseille echo a team of Harlem working girls introduced earlier in the novel and compete to transform Lafala’s figuratively castrated legs into potent “honeysticks.”85 When it comes to La Fleur’s unpurchased affections, however, her desires are same-sex. As Aslima explains, her rival is “different from most of us. She doesn’t go crazy over men. She hates men and goes with them only to make money.”86 Dissecting the sexual politics of modern prostitution with unusual realism and a creative dose of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), the novel clarifies that La Fleur’s authentic love and trusted partner is no male procurer but a “Greek girl.”87 In Home to Harlem, McKay’s spokesman Ray praises the ancient lyricist Sappho as “a wonderful woman, a great Greek poet,” whose life gave “two lovely words to modern language,” “Sapphic” and “lesbian.”88 In Romance in Marseille, these words spring into modern life in the person of La Fleur’s girlfriend, a young woman from Sappho’s part of the world. And they are underlined by La Fleur’s last interaction with Aslima, which hints that her antipathy to the Tigress has been the other side of craving. La Fleur fights to save her adversary from her pimp’s vengeance, pulling at her on her couch and breaking down in tears, vowing that “she was sorry”89 she had ever been cruel. The Tigress neither reciprocates nor acts on La Fleur’s warning, but McKay succeeds in planting the prospect that Lafala has been the odd one out in the triangle, from one angle the empowered subject of Aslima’s maturing love and from another the token object of a charged emotional exchange between women. None of this last-minute retouching erases the novel’s displays of nonchalant misogyny. Lafala righteously gut-punches La Fleur with his remanned “stump,”90 for example, and affections between men on McKay’s Marseille docks are readily cemented through common enjoyment of a woman’s humiliation. For its part, Du Bois’s NAACP comes in for a nasty sexist insult as “C.U.N.T.,” the “Christian Unity of Negro Tribes.”91 Even so, the late-arriving evidence of La Fleur’s hunger for Aslima reveals that more than one formidable, plot-moving female character promised to grab the book before McKay let it go.

  “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” the first step toward Romance in Marseille, opened new paths for McKay when depicting women and same-sex desire. “The Jungle” would not only bring male queer figures out of the shadows, it would also portray flawed but sympathetic lesbians. Wayne F. Cooper’s excellent, still-standard 1987 biography of McKay observes that in “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” the author “frankly and sympathetically discussed for the first time the plight of homosexuals in Western society.”92 Cooper’s praise overstates the book’s qualifications as a landmark LGBTQ manifesto, since it misses the fact that it refrains from picturing homosexuality as much of a plight to begin with. But Cooper’s accent on the candor and compassion of McKay’s portraiture points to one reason behind the hesitation of potential publishers. McKay’s editor at Harper & Brothers beginning with Home to Harlem, Eugene Saxton, apparently winced at the comfortably queer characters of “The Jungle,” wondering if they “would be accepted by the American reading public.”93 Saxton’s push to renovate and liberalize Harper led him to court such pagan moderns as Edna St. Vincent Millay, but his plans to publish the new did not eliminate every trace of his editorial squeamishness. As Banjo made its way to press, he had supervised Harper’s removal of the novel’s most graphic “vernacular phrasing.”94 He surrendered to McKay’s pleas to return his original language only at the author’s own expense, reasoning that “the book was already in proofs.”95 The bald-faced take on the queer vernacular in McKay’s “Jungle” was a bridge too far for Saxton, it seems, beyond the reach of even such a one-sided bargain.

  Unease with a novel’s open and flexible sexuality was a familiar complication for the bisexual McKay, like Millay a veteran of Harlem and Greenwich Village bohemias in the “Lyrical Left” era of hybrid erotic and political radicalisms. Following the critical yet not financial success of Harlem Shadows,96 an epochal addition to black world poetry including the now-canonical sonnets “If We Must Die” and “America,” McKay decided he should try his luck in a more popular mode. Settling in Paris with the support of a Garland Fund97 grant from 1923 to 1925, he took his first stab at a novel. The result was “Color Scheme,” an effort to narrow the gap between Harlem’s official renaissance and its everyday black folk, to McKay’s mind a people of unprompted creativity who expressed themselves “with a zest as yet to be depicted by a true artist.”98 His inaugural novel would hew “hard to the line” of their lively sincerity, McKay affirmed, and compose “a realistic comedy of life as I saw it among Negroes.”99 A sexual passage or two might need masking in French phrases, he conceded, but the truth of humanly messy black desire would for once be told without regard for the consequences. “I make my Negro characters yarn and backbite and fuck like people the world over,”100 McKay swanked to Arthur Schomburg, the Puerto Rican bibliophile whose collection grew to include the final, finished typescript of Romance in Marseille.

  McKay’s design for “Color Scheme,” an anticipatory salvo against the slightly later Du Boisian case for art as racial propaganda, prefigured the impetus behind the stories, poems, and plays of Fire!! (1926), the little magazine that sent the biggest shockwaves through Harlem’s renaissance. Edited by Wallace Thurman and with contributions from “Younger Negro Artists” including Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Richard Bruce Nugent, Fire!! was intended “to burn up a lot of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas of the past”101 and to scandalize black bourgeois tastes in particular. It emphatically accomplished the second task. The reaction of the bourgeois critic at the Afro-American, who owned up to tossing “the first issue of Fire!! into the fire,”102 was typical. Had it been published, McKay’s “Color Scheme” would have come in for similarly spirited reactions. More important, it would have antedated the first starkly queer prose fiction of the Harlem Renaissance, Nugent’s most daring addition to Fire!!, the elliptical, genre-bending New Negro roll call “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,”103 now considered the font of black queer writing. All that can be known for sure about the contents of McKay’s first pass at a novel, however, are references to the text in correspondence. Alfred A. Knopf, Hughe
s’s innovative highbrow publisher, rejected “Color Scheme” in July 1925, citing its unevenness and the minor snag that “should it ever appear in print its explicit sexual references would almost certainly be judged obscene by the courts.”104 McKay avoided a chancy future as a modernist cause célèbre by burning his single copy of the novel, beating every reviewer to the bonfire.