Romance in Marseille

by Claude McKay

  McKay seems to have put Romance out of mind as soon as he sailed for New York, and not much changed for it during his first years back in the city. The single, easily overlooked reference to the novel in his 1937 memoir comes as part of an excuse for why he reluctantly, and later regretfully, contributed to Nancy Cunard’s Negro: An Anthology (1934): “Meanwhile I had come to the point of a breakdown while working on my novel in Morocco; and besides I was in pecuniary difficulties.”149 No identifying title of this novel, neither “The Jungle and the Bottoms” nor “Savage Loving” nor Romance in Marseille, is thought worth providing. A Long Way from Home abounds with wordy impressions of McKay’s rootless life, first as a newly arrived American poet moonlighting on the Pennsylvania Railroad, then as an editor of The Liberator and a draftsman of the Harlem Renaissance, and finally as an elective exile in France, Spain, England, Russia, Germany, and Morocco. It is peppered with hundreds of texts, incidents, and observations, from exchanges with prominent artists and underground revolutionaries, to whole poems and stories of cities across Europe and Africa. The memoir’s single, cursory reference to a Marseille novel McKay had given five recent years indicates how little he wanted to remember it by 1937, a sign of his bitterness over its long, laborious road. This first publication of Romance in Marseille testifies that A Long Way from Home buried a worthy book. In the case of Lafala and his stowaway crew, a hard-pressed self-critic proved too mistrustful of his own work, and foreshortened what should have been one of the bravest and liveliest extensions of his legacy.

  GARY EDWARD HOLCOMB and WILLIAM J. MAXWELL

  A Note on the Text

  The story of the provenance and absence of Romance in Marseille over the past eighty-seven years may be as interesting as the novel itself. To begin with, it should be noted that Romance is not a long-lost, now-recovered text, since access to the novel has been possible to some degree since the 1940s. As the introduction describes, the title Claude McKay applied to the novel from 1929 to 1930 was “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” and then during the early 1930s, the title became “Savage Loving.” For related reasons, two hand-corrected typescript versions of Romance have been available to researchers. A truncated draft of the novel is kept in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, while the lengthier, complete, and final version is held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.1 How the two versions came to be, and how they came to rest in two historic African American archives, makes for another significant chapter of Romance in Marseille.

  Distracted by temperament and circumstance, McKay more than once forgot about long writing projects he had left behind, and this is the case with Romance in Marseille.2 By the time he published his 1937 memoir, A Long Way from Home, McKay recollected the Marseille-set novel only in passing, and somewhat mysteriously did not call it by any of its several names. A mere four years later, he claimed to have forgotten about it entirely.3 In 1941, the same year that McKay completed the recently rediscovered novel Amiable with Big Teeth (2017),4 Harlem Renaissance enthusiast Carl Van Vechten asked McKay to donate his manuscripts to the new James Weldon Johnson collection.5 The collection was under assembly with help from Yale, and was then housed in the university’s Gothic Revival Sterling Library (the translucent granite modernist structure now synonymous with the Beinecke would not be built until the 1960s). Habitually itinerant, McKay had lost track of several of his own typescripts over the years, so he reacted positively to the chance to have Van Vechten and Yale do the work of retrieving his missing manuscripts for him.6 Yale librarian Bernhard Knollenberg contacted McKay’s publishers and requested the manuscripts, and all complied.7 Lee Furman passed along the master copy of the lively A Long Way from Home. Dutton sent the manuscript of the Federal Writers’ Project–sponsored study Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). And Harper and Brothers dispatched the original typescript of the last McKay novel published in his lifetime, Banana Bottom (1933).

  During the acquisition process, however, a phantom document turned up. While looking through his files, a Harper editor found “a shorter typescript of 88 pages which was attached to” the typescript of Banana Bottom.8 “These unnamed scripts had been stored in my files for some time,” the editor recounted, “and I should have been unaware of their presence had word not come to me from you of Mr. McKay’s wishes.” Though the editor does not specify the typescript, he does include the useful information that on the top page is the ink stamp of “W. A. Bradley, the Paris agent who was handling the matter for McKay.” In a postscript to Knollenberg, the Harper editor also notes he once had worked with McKay. The identity of the Harper editor, John B. Turner, marks an iconic turn in Romance’s provenance, since the man in question was none other than John Trounstine, McKay’s literary agent after Bradley. Trounstine’s P.S. includes the tidbit that he had legally changed his name to Turner. In the early 1930s, McKay had met Trounstine in Tangier. Having abruptly parted with William Aspenwall Bradley, his astute “Yankee” representative, in part over the fate of “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” McKay asked Trounstine to be his literary agent.9 In 1933, Trounstine sent McKay the demoralizing news that Banana Bottom had washed out. To McKay’s vexation and eventual wrath, his new agent was then unsuccessful in securing a publisher for the renamed “Savage Loving.”10

  Another curious detail is that participants in the correspondence—including McKay—allude to the Romance manuscript not by one of its sundry official titles but as “Lafala.” Because no title appeared on the document attached to Banana Bottom, Knollenberg and Van Vechten abstracted the name of the protagonist, and McKay likely rolled with “Lafala” in order to expedite his plan. Yale justifiably wanted all the McKay literary documents it could get, including “Lafala.” But when McKay learned of the full situation, he wrote back to Van Vechten in a temper, demanding that he be sent all of the scripts with the exception of the just-published Harlem: Negro Metropolis: “I especially want to have back Banana Bottom and the unfinished manuscript of Lafala, which I had forgotten about and don’t want to be in any collection.”11 A shrewd Van Vechten wrote to Knollenberg forthwith, requesting that he return “Lafala” to McKay, suggesting that the down-and-out author might hope that a benefactor would buy the manuscript from him to donate to the burgeoning James Weldon Johnson collection.12

  What is now an eighty-seven-page version of the novel at the Beinecke, with Bradley’s name and address stamped on the title page, is most likely “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” the initial draft that McKay discussed in correspondence with his then-agent William Bradley in 1929 and 1930. Since McKay himself referred to the novel as “unfinished,” we are convinced that the Beinecke version is not simply a stray fragment but the honed if uncompleted version that McKay composed before deciding to expand the novel. Near-conclusive evidence suggesting that the eighty-seven-page manuscript is the original version can be found in the fact that Marseille is still referred to as “Dreamport,” the code name for the Mediterranean city that McKay decided on while originally outlining the narrative.13 Moreover, the name “Lafala” is handwritten over the redacted name “Taloufa” eight times in the document, showing that McKay was still in the early stages of changing the protagonist’s name. A both helpful and hindering fact is that on what passes for the cover page of the Beinecke typescript is the hand-printed name “Mac Kay,” misspelled and complete with a mistaken space between the syllables. Below the name, in quotation marks, are the words “New Novel,” with no title following, authorizing the three correspondents to refer to the untitled manuscript as “Lafala” in the early 1940s. While no title appears on the typescript, the Beinecke manuscript is catalogued as “Romance in Marseille,” with no Anglicizing final s. The “New Novel” label was likely the result of an editor creating a top page for easier filing, which would also account for the error in McKay’s surname. In view of all of the above, we consider the eighty-seven-page Beinecke manuscript to be the draft of the nov
el that McKay produced from 1929 to 1930, known during the time of its creation as “The Jungle and the Bottoms.”

  Significantly, rather than intending to find a buyer for “The Jungle”/“Lafala” with a view toward donation, as Van Vechten guessed, McKay likely planned to try to publish it once more. Two years after the Van Vechten-Knollenberg-McKay exchanges, Ivie Jackman, the sister of McKay’s friend Harold, contacted the author to request material for what would become the Countee Cullen–Harold Jackman Memorial Collection at Atlanta University. McKay replied that aside from a number of valuable letters from James Weldon Johnson, “the only other thing I have here is a novel which I was to work over some day and this is the only copy.”14 McKay is almost certainly referring to his single copy of “The Jungle”/“Lafala.” The author has apparently regained some of his enthusiasm, and is thinking of restoring the novel with the final chapters and dramatic ending that appear in the longer “Savage Loving,” ultimately titled Romance in Marseille.

  The 172-page Schomburg typescript of Romance is therefore in all likelihood the final, complete draft, produced from 1932 to 1933 in Tangier. It is the result of McKay’s plan to go through the novel “again more critically,” as he had written to Max Eastman in December 1930, resolving in particular “that the whole second half could be rearranged for the better.”15 Typed on the Schomburg version’s title page is “ROMANCE IN MARSEILLES,” and beneath that “BY CLAUDE McKAY.” The added s in Marseille might complicate matters except that the title page is the only portion of the document where an s is appended. Throughout the remainder of the text, as in the Beinecke version, “Marseille” appears in its shorter spelling. When McKay requested that “Lafala” be returned to him, planning to flog the novel to additional publishers, he likely hoped it was the full, complete version (the Schomburg document) rather than the shorter Yale typescript. We believe, moreover, that McKay never recovered the finished 172-page copy of the manuscript now archived in Harlem.

  Among the most compelling evidence that the 172-page typescript is the final version is the fact that throughout the document the urban setting is identified as “Marseille,” with no use of the veiled “Dreamport.” What is more, McKay changes the name of the neighborhood of the city where most of the narrative takes place. The actual historical name of the Marseille quarter where most of the novel’s action occurs is le Panier: “the Basket.” It’s logical, then, given the shape of the Basket, that in the earlier version McKay gives the district the fictional name of “the Bottoms.”16 In the Beinecke version, Taloufa/Lafala is even referred to as a “Bottomist.”17 In the later, longer version, the Bottoms becomes “Quayside,” probably owing to the 1933 publication of McKay’s novel Banana Bottom and the need to avoid another use of the nether term.

  When the eighty-seven-page typescript of Romance is compared to the 172-page document, the major and obvious distinction between the two is their length. And the difference in size between the two texts is more than their respective page counts would indicate. The Beinecke manuscript comes to about 24,000 words, while the Schomburg version adds up to more than 40,000.18 The Beinecke draft ends in modernist ambiguity, as a distressed Lafala eludes the “political police” and vanishes back into the obscure backstreets of the Bottoms, just as McKay describes the plot in his December 1929 letter to Bradley.

  Revising the novel in 1932, McKay dynamically expanded his earlier draft, adding eleven more chapters to the original. The later version also adds two memorable white characters who play key roles in the plot, Big Blonde and Petit Frère. The Schomburg version’s more recognizably plotted storyline is the most persuasive reason to conclude that it is the finished novel. The narrative’s final passages follow the ascent and descent of the classic Freytag pyramid, as the climax-dénouement stages the Aslima-Titin love-hate tango. The wretched La Fleur Noire stands by powerless to prevent the bloodshed as the prostitute and pimp rehearse their variation on the fatal final scene from Carmen. Yet this ending, too, tosses in a dash of modern irony, as the reader has learned that Lafala, under threat from the French penal system, has safely embarked for his West African homeland. The extended Schomburg version of Romance thereby lives up to the generic “romance” promised in its title—among other, more novelistic things, it is a French-inflected roman in which chivalry is dead, but love remains a life-and-death adventure.

  While the Schomburg version is complete, the story of how the Schomburg Center came to acquire it is somewhat obscure. Hope Virtue McKay, McKay’s only child, was in possession of the 172-page typescript in March 1953, as she loaned it to the Schomburg for an exhibition. The library later returned the manuscript to Carl Cowl, McKay’s last literary agent and executor.19 In the early 1970s, an eager Cowl then sold the typescript to Harvey and Linda Tucker of the firm Black Sun Inc. The Schomburg finding aid indicates that Romance in Marseille was acquired permanently as part of a 1974 purchase from Black Sun, a highly regarded dealer in modern rare books and manuscripts.20

  Tracking down precisely how “Savage Loving” became Romance in Marseille has been somewhat less conclusive. McKay produced no known letter or other document that refers to Romance in Marseille with or without the s. The primary sources we have for trusting that McKay eventually settled on this title are the two typescripts: the Beinecke’s finding aid and the Schomburg’s title page both list Romance in Marseille. In addition, Cowl refers to the novel in his correspondence by this title on several occasions.

  One more intriguing detail informs the question of the final title. While frantically searching for a publisher for the novel in 1933, McKay was surprised—and disgusted—to discover that the name “Savage Loving” had provoked a negative reaction from a Harlem Renaissance luminary: his fellow poet Countee Cullen. Writing to Max Eastman from Tangier on June 28, 1933, McKay fumes yet again about his ineffectual, “sissy” agent John Trounstine: “He writes that he was discussing the title of the book with Countee Cullen who thought it sounded obscene. Can’t understand why he would consider the opinion of that little prig important and also give out the title of the book in Harlem before it has found a publisher. Next thing he will be showing them the manuscript up there.”21 Given McKay’s history of second-guessing himself, it nevertheless seems sure that he allowed “that little prig” to inspire a change in the book’s title. It would not have taken long to hear the carillons set off by the word “obscene.” The same rhetoric was used to suppress Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), two of the modern novels McKay prized the most. McKay also knew all too well the violent reaction to Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926). Such hostility, Langston Hughes reports in The Big Sea (1940), was due to black readers’ abhorrence for the offensive, sensational title.22 McKay would also have recognized Cullen’s relative shrewdness when measuring the mood of critics and consumers on both sides of the color line, the wide range where McKay intended to target his book.23 Practically begging for scraps, the Jamaican author was in no position to risk further rejection simply because of a title. At some point, likely in late 1933, he changed the novel’s name to the picturesque and less provocative Romance in Marseille.

  Why Romance in Marseille has remained out of print for the past several decades marks a final, frustrating chapter in the novel’s history. During the 1990s, Carl Cowl initiated an arrangement to allow the University of Exeter Press to publish Romance in Marseille along with three stories from Gingertown. Premature listings to the contrary, however, the book was never finalized for publication. Eventually, the Schomburg Center, then representing McKay’s estate, intervened with the UK press, noting the termination clause entailed in the contract: “If at any time before or after publication of the Work . . . [it] is not listed in the Publishers[’] catalogue of books in print, and this condition continues for more than 6 months, . . . [this] Agreement will terminate immediately, and all the Publishers’ rights to the Work herein granted shall immediately revert to the Prop
rietor.”24 Despite the flurry of promise, Romance thus lingered in the archives, a dream of republication deferred.

  This first-ever published text of Romance in Marseille is based closely and faithfully on the longer, final Schomburg version of the novel. (Our thanks to Shannon Davis of the Olin Library at Washington University in St. Louis for her assistance in scanning the typescript.) We have edited the book with a light touch, doing as we imagine McKay’s Harper editor Eugene Saxton would have done had he been less wary of raw language and queer themes. We have refrained from any major changes to McKay’s sentences, correcting negligible spelling and typographical errors and supplying a handful of obviously missing words. More consistently than in the original typescript, we employ American spellings, regularize punctuation and some references to people and places, and respect undraconian modern conventions for representing dialogue. Dedicated readers may of course check the results against the available Schomburg source. We have also added explanatory notes that follow the main text, most of which illuminate the novel’s wide-ranging and often learned political, musical, and literary intertexts or which translate French terms left untranslated by McKay. The reader is invited to use or ignore the notes as she or he likes, since our intention is to add to firsthand engagements with McKay’s work only as much as desired. We of course hope that every reader enjoys Romance in Marseille’s never shy, at times eccentric, and thoroughly distinctive contribution to modern black fiction.