Romance in Marseille

by Claude McKay

  2.Sometimes he was jailed for a short term; sometimes he went into hiding: One of several stretches of tough-guy, telegraphic narration in Romance in Marseille that demonstrate the influence of Ernest Hemingway’s direct, pared-down style. The prose of McKay’s previous novels Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929) is on average more lyrical and less staccato, its rhythms stamped by the quite different muse of D. H. Lawrence. For more on the shape of McKay’s admiration for Hemingway, see the introduction.

  3.Petit Frère: This French nickname for Big Blonde’s friend and lover means “Little Brother.” For the remainder of Romance in Marseille, young, effeminate gay men may be called petit frères, or “little brothers,” in McKay’s Quayside idiom.

  4.demi-johns: Glass bottles with narrow necks and wide bodies sometimes covered with wicker, from the French dame-jeanne, or “Lady Jane.” In Britain, a standard demi-john contains 4.5 liters—an imperial gallon—of beer or another liquid.

  5.political secret police: As noted in the introduction, the political secret police plot of Romance in Marseille, ultimately revealed as a red herring, makes hay from McKay’s frightening run-ins with French and British agents in Morocco. For more on these run-ins, see Wayne F. Cooper’s biography Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987, 278–279. McKay’s American FBI file, international in scope and the first compiled on a major black author, is discussed in Gary Edward Holcomb’s Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. It can be read in full at William J. Maxwell’s online F.B. Eyes Digital Archive (http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes/).

  6.bal-musette: A popular type of café or bar, first found in Paris in the 1880s, in which patrons danced tangos and “bourrées” to the sound of an accordion or musette, an instrument of the bagpipe family. The (originally) working-class dancers and musicians of bal-musettes were painted by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Georges Valmier (1885–1937), and other French-based modernist artists. In addition to this visual inspiration, the bal-musette may have appealed to McKay as the indigenous French equivalent of the jazz club.

  7.cache-col: French for a scarf or muffler, in this instance worn with style.

  8.the loving omelettes: Not a tender breakfast, but apparently McKay’s humorous coinage for a style of close dancing. Like the eggs in an omelet, beaten together into a single mass, the pajama-clad girls sharing this dance seem to blend into each other indistinguishably.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  1.And through St. Dominique he had obtained a few pieces of African wood sculpture . . . from some West African seamen: St. Dominique’s white college friend, now a municipal clerk in Marseille, has become interested in his city’s black population thanks to his passion for modern art. In this, he resembles the European modernist artists he admires, many of whom were enthralled by the traditional African art they first encountered in the early 1900s. In France, Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), and their colleagues in the School of Paris studied West and Central African masks and sculptures that offered lessons in abstraction, vivid stylization, and pictorial flatness. Examples of so-called “art nègre” could be seen at the Musée d’Ethnographie on the Trocadero near the Eiffel Tower, but McKay’s municipal clerk joins Matisse, André Derain (1880–1954), and the Belgian painter James Ensor (1860–1949) in purchasing African carvings for his own collection. McKay complained, sharply and precociously, about the unscrupulous and alienating display of African art in Western collections in his 1923 study The Negroes in America, written for Soviet use in the Soviet Union. The Benin bronzes in the British Museum, he charged, doubled as tokens “of British piracy, exploitation, and deceit. . . .” In the same book, McKay suggested that Fauvism, Cubism, and other Parisian avant-gardes were hatched by those who “followed the [French] tricolor into the African jungles and returned to Paris with samples of Negro art.” See The Negroes in America, translated from the Russian by Robert J. Winter, Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1979, 56–57.

  2.Aframerican: With its American emphasis, its fondness for generous author photographs, and its coupling of black art and black advancement, this magazine is reminiscent of the NAACP’s Crisis, one of the two “chief journals of African American literature and criticism” during Harlem Renaissance. (According to George Hutchinson, the Urban League’s Opportunity magazine was the other.) See Hutchinson’s The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1995, 127. Whatever the Aframerican’s inspirations, McKay carefully and self-referentially situates St. Dominique as a foreign survivor of the New Negro movement’s American publicity apparatus.

  3.“It’s a matter of economic determinism—”: St. Dominique, a Marxist, believes that the psychology of racially mixed “mulattoes,” and of everyone else, is finally determined by economic relationships, the basis of all other social ideas and arrangements.

  4.“It’s a stinking proletarian case, from Marseille . . . to New York and back”: Much as St. Dominique’s Marxism leads him to view race consciousness as an economically determined matter, it instructs him to consider the case of Lafala’s stowaway, amputation, and jailing as a “stinking proletarian case”—a case, that is, more closely linked to the victim’s working-class identity than to his racial one.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  1.a radio set . . . at the same time as the pleasure-lovers of those places: The Tout-va-Bien’s new radio instantly familiarizes patrons with the popular song “masterpieces” introduced in the vaudeville houses of Broadway in New York, the theaters of Piccadilly in London, and the cabarets of Montmartre in Paris. This aside represents one McKay contribution to the deep vein of attacks by literary modernists on supposedly alienating new sound technologies, a vein running from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) to Richard Wright’s “Long Black Song” (1938). Guglielmo Marconi’s design for a radio transmitter was first patented in the United States in 1901.

  2.The craze of the Charleston and Black Bottom was about dead. . . . But the beguine was there, . . . the Aframerican shuffle and the African swaying: McKay’s narrator observes that the fad for the Charleston, an African American–authored dance that peaked in the mid-1920s, had nearly passed at the Tout-va-Bien. (Whatever its legal status, this café sometimes serves as a showcase and blender of various national black dance styles.) The fad for the Black Bottom, a similarly exuberant African American dance, commercialized by the Broadway show George White’s Scandals of 1926, had faded as well. (McKay’s Pan-African Quayside, called “the Bottoms” in the first draft of Romance, is a different kind of black Bottom.) But the narrator notes that another black step, related to the most basic moves in African and “Aframerican” dance, survived to take their place. This was the beguine, the slow, rhumba-like dance style identified with the island of Martinique, St. Dominique’s birthplace in the French Caribbean.

  3.Aslima also felt the beguine for Lafala: For this alternative but still-music-related sense of “beguine,” see the note for “beguine” in chapter 10.

  4.Her primitive flamenco went naturally well with the music . . . revealing the African influence of both: Aslima may feel the beguine for Lafala, but she flaunts her love through the flamenco, among other things a highly syncopated, formally demanding dance form pioneered by Andalusian “gitanos,” the Gypsy, or Roma, people of southern Spain. Aslima’s “primitive” interpretation of the dance reveals its African ties and its kinship with the beguine. Modern scholarship has tracked McKay in detecting Moorish influences on flamenco.

  5.“The Queen!”: Embarrassing La Fleur, the patrons of the Tout-va-Bien elevate Aslima to royalty after her flamenco performance. Earlier, it was La Fleur who was hailed as “La Reine,” or the Queen, if in jest.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  1.nor the music of hymen . . . glorious like the songs of Solomon’s loves: Nothing will keep Big B
londe from his date with Petit Frère—not “the music of hymen,” erotic songs and poems celebrating marriage, as glorious as “the songs of Solomon’s loves” found in the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament. Solomon’s songs in the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon celebrate, in intensely sensuous terms, the love between man and woman and of the Lord for his people. Big Blonde’s love for his Little Brother is thus stronger than the most captivating literature of straight and sacred Eros.

  2.the Grand Maquereau: French slang for “the Big Pimp.” Less colloquially, a “maquereau” is, as it sounds, the fish known in English as “mackerel.” Karl Marx included the exploitative, human sort of maquereaux in his famous roll call of bottom-dwelling types—the “maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati,” etc.—belonging to the so-called “lumpenproletariat,” a political anxiety for Marx but for McKay a choice fictional subject. See Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), New York: International Publishers, 1987, 75.

  3.if Big Blonde was less interested in petit frères and more in petites filles: In other words, if Big Blonde was less attracted by little boys and more by little girls.

  4.“What is this thing called love?” said Falope: Falope’s question salutes Cole Porter’s song “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” an eventual jazz standard introduced in the musical Wake Up and Dream (1929). “What is this thing called love?” asks the first line of lyrics, “This funny thing called love?” (1–2). With this allusion, McKay rivals the radio-listening habitués of the Tout-va-Bien in rapidly absorbing the latest popular music. Porter claimed the tune was suggested by witnessing a native dance while visiting Marrakesh. See Charles Schwartz, Cole Porter: A Biography, New York: Dial Press, 1977, 143.

  5.“it’s five in mine,” said St. Dominique: With “five in mine,” St. Dominique points to the five letters in “amour,” the word for love in his native French. The English word “rope,” like “love,” has four letters, a commonality Babel cleverly notes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  1.the Petit Pain: French for “the Little Bread,” or more exactly, “the Bread Roll.”

  2.throwing dice for a game called “Pigs” with three lads evidently of the slum proletariat: “Pigs” is a craps game of folk origins. See John Scarne and Clayton Rawson, Scarne on Dice, Drake, Ohio: Coachwhip, 2017. Aslima and Lafala speak of their love affair as another kind of piggish game.

  3.The proprietor said they couldn’t dance for he had no dancing license: Though dancing breaks out there, the Petit Pain café is not licensed for it. In interwar France, only businesses such as a bal-musette, a club usually featuring an accordion band, were sanctioned for dancing.

  4.an old cocotte: An elderly, once-fashionable prostitute.

  5.“cul-cassé”: Likely McKay’s reversal and back-translation of the French slang term casse-cul, used to refer to a coward, a villain, a “pain in the ass,” and a “bugger” (one who engages in anal copulation). The last of these meanings is particularly significant in view of the context, a desperate character’s effort to insult a gay man. A caisse-couilles, meanwhile, is a “ball-buster.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  1.bloomers: An alternative to the skirt, bloomers are a pant-like, roomy woman’s garment covering the lower body. Introduced to Western women in the mid-nineteenth century, they were named after the American feminist Amelia Bloomer (1818–1894). Significantly for Aslima, bloomers were associated with exotic “Turkish dress” as well as with enhanced liberties for women.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  1.instantaneous photographer: A term introduced during the nineteenth century for a photographer who captured life in motion with a quick exposure, in this instance to profit from the tourist trade. The English photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), famous for his stop-motion pictures of animal locomotion, was sometimes labeled an instantaneous photographer in his day.

  2.“And I’ve got to go with the broad alone”: Babel’s song exploits the double meaning of “broad” as both a woman and a ship in early twentieth-century American slang. Lafala, for his part, finally goes with the latter sort of broad alone.

  3.“Mektoub! Mektoub!” (Destiny! Destiny!): McKay explicitly self-translates the Arabic term “mektoub” or “maktoob” (مكتوب), meaning fate or predestination, as “destiny.” In his memoir A Long Way from Home, he interpolates his poem “A Farewell to Morocco,” which concludes with another common translation of the term: “It is written.” See A Long Way from Home, 341. With Aslima’s cry of “Mektoub!,” McKay’s novel too has been written, and has nearly reached its destined end.

  4.chorean state: A state characterized by nervous, involuntary movement. The highly unusual word “chorean” is most likely McKay’s attempt to adjectivize the noun “chorea,” which refers to a neurological disorder that causes irregular bodily contractions.

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