Romance in Marseille

by Claude McKay

  Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1996.

  James, Jennifer C., and Cynthia Wu. “Editors’ Introduction: Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Literature: Intersections and Interventions.” MELUS 31.3 (fall 2006): 3–13.

  James, Winston. A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion. London: Verso, 2000.

  Lee, Steven S. The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

  Lowney, John. “‘Harlem Jazzing’: Claude McKay, Home to Harlem, and Jazz Internationalism.” Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017: 27–58.

  Maxwell, William J. New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

  ——. F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

  Newman, Eric H. “Ephemeral Utopias: Queer Cruising, Literary Form, and Diasporic Imagination in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and Banjo.” Callaloo 38.1 (winter 2015): 167–185.

  Posmentier, Sonya. “The Provision Ground in New York: Claude McKay and the Form of Memory.” American Literature 84.2 (June 2012): 273–300.

  Schmidt, Michael David. “A Queer Romance of Materialism: McKay’s Romance in Marseilles.” The Materialism of the Encounter: Queer Sociality and Capital in Modern Literature. Wayne State University Dissertations, 2013, Paper 697: 172–221.

  Schwarz, A. B. Crista. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.

  Stone, Andrea. “The Black Atlantic Revisited, the Body Reconsidered: On Lingering, Liminality, Lies, and Disability.” American Literary History 24.4 (winter 2012): 814–826.

  Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

  Explanatory Notes

  Written between 1929 and 1933, first named “The Jungle and the Bottoms” and then “Savage Loving,” Claude McKay’s novel was ultimately titled Romance in Marseille. With a few minor corrections, our text reflects the 172-page, evidently final typescript of Romance kept in the Claude McKay papers at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. An earlier eighty-seven-page version of the novel, filed as “Romance in Marseille,” is archived in the James Weldon Johnson Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in New Haven. For more information on the novel’s provenance, see “A Note on the Text.”

  INTRODUCTION

  1.Claude McKay, Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (1929), New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970, 11.

  2.Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (1937), New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007, 231.

  3.Claude McKay, Romance in Marseille, New York: Penguin Classics, 2020, 4.

  4.Alexandre Dumas, Impressions de Voyage: Le Midi de la France (1842), Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1887, 171.

  5.Romance in Marseille, 5.

  6.Ibid., 24.

  7.Ibid., 28.

  8.Ibid.

  9.Ibid.

  10.Ibid.

  11.Ibid., 94.

  12.Ibid., 73.

  13.Ibid., 74.

  14.Ibid., 112.

  15.Banjo, 316.

  16.While in most of the complete typescript of Romance in Marseille McKay uses “Lafala,” the typed name “Taloufa” appears, redacted and replaced by the printed “Lafala,” eight times, on pages 10, 16, 24 (three times), 26 (twice), and 28, to be precise.

  17.Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Feb. 10, 1928, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records, 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  18.Romance in Marseille, 28.

  19.Ibid., 4.

  20.“Champion Escapes from Ireland in Spite of Refusal of English and American Ships to Sell Him Ticket,” Afro-American (April 13, 1923): 14.

  21.“Bring Balto. Boys from West,” Afro-American (Aug. 18, 1928): 20.

  22.“Stowaway Freed When Ship Docked,” New York Amsterdam News (May 16, 1928): 3.

  23.“Jailed on Arrival in England as Stowaway,” New York Amsterdam News (April 18, 1928): 3.

  24.“Three Stowaways Found on Byrd Ship,” The New York Times (Aug. 27, 1928): 1.

  25.“Drop Stowaway on Byrd Ship,” The Pittsburgh Courier (Sept. 22, 1928): 15.

  26.“Stowaway to Carry Appeal to Australia,” Chicago Defender (Oct. 20, 1928): 4.

  27.W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” in The New Negro (1925), ed. Alain Locke, New York: Atheneum, 1992, 412.

  28.W. E. B. Du Bois, “Review of Claude McKay’s Banjo and Nella Larsen’s Passing,” The Crisis 36 (July 1929): 234.

  29.“Kept Manacled on Ship, Says Stowaway,” The New York Times (May 24, 1927): 27.

  30.Ibid.

  31.For more on this remarkable public hospital, opened in 1902, see Lorrie Conway, Forgotten Ellis Island: The Extraordinary Story of America’s Immigrant Hospital, New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

  32.“Ship’s Officers Deny Cruelty to Stowaway,” The New York Times (May 25, 1927): 38.

  33.“Kept Manacled on Ship, Says Stowaway,” The New York Times (May 24, 1927): 27.

  34.“Stowaway Fails in Suit,” The New York Times (May 27, 1927): 41.

  35.Romance in Marseille, 3.

  36.Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Feb. 10, 1928, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records, 1909-1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  37.Ibid.

  38.Ibid.

  39.Romance in Marseille, 19.

  40.Ibid.

  41.Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Feb. 10, 1928, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records, 1909-1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  42.McKay, A Long Way from Home, 185.

  43.Claude McKay, letter to “Le Directeur en Chef, La Compagnie Fabre,” Jan. 13, 1928, Claude McKay Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.

  44.Ibid.

  45.Ibid.

  46.Ibid.

  47.Ibid.

  48.Ibid.

  49.Ibid.

  50.Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Feb. 10, 1928, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records, 1909-1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  51.Romance in Marseille, 100.

  52.Ibid., 101.

  53.David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, New York: Penguin, 1997, xxiii.

  54.Romance in Marseille, 130.

  55.Banjo, 326.

  56.The typescripts catalogued as “Romance in Marseille” and “Marseilles,” respectively, can be found in two rich U.S. rare book and manuscript archives. The shorter typescript, titled by McKay as “The Jungle and the Bottoms” and likely revised between December 1929 and June 1930, is housed in the James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, at Yale University in New Haven. The longer typescript—almost certainly containing what was originally called “Savage Loving” and produced between 1932 and 1933—is kept in the Claude McKay Letters and Manuscripts at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, located in Harlem.

  57.Langston Hughes, letter to Claude McKay, July 25, 1925, Claude McKay Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.

  58.The most frequently cited
if not quite standard editions of McKay’s first two published novels are these: Home to Harlem, foreword by Wayne F. Cooper, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987, originally published by New York’s Harper & Brothers in 1928; and Banjo: A Story Without a Plot, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970, originally published by Harper & Brothers in 1929.

  59.Romance in Marseille, 4.

  60.For basic information on this working history, see Claude McKay’s letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, March 18, 1930, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909-1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin; and his letter to Max Eastman, June 27, 1930, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  61.Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), in Gertrude Stein: Writings, 1903–1932, ed. Catherine Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, New York: Library of America, 1998, 900.

  62.Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Dec. 21, 1929, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  63.Ibid.

  64.Ibid.

  65.A Long Way from Home, 214.

  66.Ibid.

  67.Though St. Dominique was inspired by “this” Senghor, the character is also semi-autobiographical, possibly taking the place that an alter ego named Malty occupied in the now-lost original draft. The fictional St. Dominique fills the office that McKay himself had filled when Nelson Simeon Dede was jailed, acting on Dede/Lafala’s behalf when the shipping company plots with the French authorities to imprison the protagonist. This feature of the narrative, however, differs significantly from the Ray-as-verbal-proxy McKay of the previous novels.

  68.Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Dec. 21, 1929, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  69.See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Review of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, and Melville Herskovits’ The American Negro,” The Crisis 35 (June 1928): 202.

  70.In his least temperate Harlem Renaissance-era statement on aesthetics, W. E. B. Du Bois proclaimed that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. . . . I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.” See W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Criterion of Negro Art,” The Crisis 32 (Oct. 1926): 290–297. For more on McKay’s anti-Du Boisian attitude, see his letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Dec. 21, 1929, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  71.Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Dec. 21, 1929, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  72.Ibid.

  73.Ibid.

  74.Ibid.

  75.Claude McKay, letter to Max Eastman, June 27, 1930, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  76.Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Aug. 28, 1930, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  77.Ibid.

  78.Ibid.

  79.The term “Dreamport” appears in the Beinecke version of the Romance in Marseille manuscript, though redacted, with “Marseille” written above it.

  80.Claude McKay, letter to Max Eastman, June 27, 1930, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  81.Romance in Marseille, 29.

  82.Ibid.

  83.Ibid.

  84.Claude McKay, letter to Willian Aspenwall Bradley, Dec. 21, 1929, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909-1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  85.Romance in Marseille, 17.

  86.Ibid., 41.

  87.Ibid.

  88.Home to Harlem, 128–129.

  89.Romance in Marseille, 129.

  90.Ibid., 55.

  91.Ibid., 19.

  92.Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987, 268.

  93.Ibid.

  94.George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1995, 379.

  95.Ibid.

  96.See Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922; and Claude McKay, Complete Poems, edited by William J. Maxwell, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

  97.The Garland Fund was officially known as the American Fund for Personal Service.

  98.Claude McKay, quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, 212.

  99.Claude McKay, quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, 221.

  100.Claude McKay, letter to Arthur A. Schomburg, July 17, 1925, Arthur A. Schomburg Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York.

  101.Langston Hughes, quoted in A. B. Christa Schwarz, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003, 44.

  102.Rean Graves, quoted in Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (1940), New York: Hill and Wang, 1993, 237.

  103.See Richard Bruce [Nugent], “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” Fire!!: A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists 1.1 (1926): 33–40.

  104.Wayne F. Cooper, 221.

  105.Home to Harlem, 92.

  106.Romance in Marseille, 119.

  107.Ibid., 41.

  108.Ibid.

  109.See Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, June 25, 1930, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin; and his letter to Max Eastman, June 27, 1930, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  110.See Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, July 4, 1930, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin; and his letter to Max Eastman, Dec. 1, 1930, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  111.See Shireen K. Lewis, Race, Culture, and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature and Theory from Négritude to Créolité, Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006, 28.

  112.Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions, New York: New York University Press, 2002, 30.

  113.Claude McKay, quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, 274.

  114.Claude McKay, letter to Max Eastman, Dec. 1, 1930, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  115.Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Sept. 18, 1930, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  116.See Wayne F. Cooper, 269, 412 note 16.

  117.See Wayne F. Cooper, 275.

  118.Rudolph Fisher, “White, High Yellow, Black” [review of Claude McKay’s Gingertown], New York Herald Tribune Books (March 27, 1932): 3.

  119.Claude McKay, quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, 274.

  120.Ibid.

  121.Wayne F. Cooper, 279.

  122.Both McKay and Bowles wrote about their Tangier encounter, McKay accusing Bowles of precipitating his troubles with the French colonial administration: see Paul Bowles, Without Stopping, New York: Putnam, 1972, 147–149; and McKay’s letter to Max Eastman, likely May 1933, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington. See also Gary Edward Holcomb, Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007, 66.

  123.See Claude McKay, letter to Max Eastman, April 21, 1933, Clau
de McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  124.Ibid.

  125.Romance in Marseille, 94.

  126.Ibid.

  127.Ibid., 76.

  128.See Dorothy Parker, “Review of Home to Harlem” (1928), The Portable Dorothy Parker, New York: Penguin Classics, 2006, 503. In his memoir, A Long Way from Home (1937), McKay chafed at the allegation that the publication of Nigger Heaven had anything to do with his writing Home to Harlem, pointing out he had produced a short story of the same title a year before the appearance of Van Vechten’s novel, adding “I never saw [his] book until the late spring of 1927. . . . And by that time I had nearly completed Home to Harlem.” See A Long Way from Home, 217.

  129.Dorothy Parker, “Big Blonde” (1929), in The Portable Dorothy Parker, 187.

  130.Claude McKay, letter to Max Eastman, likely May 1933, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  131.Wayne F. Cooper, 288.

  132.Clifton Fadiman, letter to Max Eastman, Sept. 12 1933, Claude McKay Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.

  133.Ibid.

  134.A Long Way from Home, 193.

  135.Ibid., 192.

  136.Ibid., 193.

  137.Ibid.

  138.Romance in Marseille, 19.

  139.DuBose Heyward, Porgy, New York: George H. Doran, 1925, 12.

  140.See Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964), New York: Scribner, 2010, 15.

  141.See Harold Jackman, letter to McKay, June 3, 1927, Claude McKay Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.

  142.See Thomas C. Mackey, Pornography on Trial: A Handbook with Cases, Laws, and Documents, Denver: ABC-Clio, 2002, 154.

  143.Claude McKay, letter to Max Eastman, 28 June 1933, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  144.Ibid.

  145.Claude McKay, quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, 288.

  146.Ibid.

  147.Ibid.