Romance in Marseille

by Claude McKay

  Romance in Marseille provides our best guess as to what “Color Scheme” would have done with its “explicit sexual references.” Both Home to Harlem and to a lesser extent Banjo contain recognizably gay characters, but they are generally surveyed from a distance as urban subcultural types, quick-drawn baby-doll “fairies” or broadly comic butches as in Billy Biasse, a Home to Harlem sidekick nicknamed “the Wolf” because “he eats his own kind.”105 A lone three-dimensional queer character, the authorial stand-in Ray, offers learned color commentary on sexual diversity in both novels, but (unlike McKay) suffers from a debilitating Freudian latency and alienation. In the less inhibited universe of Romance, same-sex love is consciously normal, customarily accepted behavior. A character called Babel, a stowaway companion of Lafala, ironically speaks in the queer-friendly lingua franca of McKay’s Vieux Port. When stealing a dance with Big Blonde, the equally king-size Babel declares that if sex is madness, then he is “crazy all ways bar none.”106 Big Blonde and other more exclusively gay characters are presented as pillars of the Quayside community, personifying neither the neurotic costs of the closet nor a desublimated Jazz Age liberation. Like Romance’s straighter figures, they naturalistically navigate the Marseille waterfront and supply plotlines along with titillating atmosphere. The lesbian La Fleur, for example, injects a louche Baudelairean note while playing a vital role in the unraveling of events involving Lafala and Aslima. Her interactions with both of these lovers underscore the ethic of sexual pleasure that McKay introduces in company with his queer characters. Lafala’s road to restored wholeness is divided between the private satisfactions of his bank account and the mutual joys of sleeping with Aslima, who refuses payment for sex and quickly refutes his worry that “‘I can’t be as piggish as in my able-bodied days.’” “‘Pigskin!’” she exclaims. “‘Forget about your feet now and thank God it wasn’t something worse that was cut off.’”107 Taking leave from Jake Barnes, the impotent hero of Ernest Hemingway’s modern classic The Sun Also Rises (1926), Lafala has the option of loving his way past his injury and trauma. “‘[W]ith you I don’t feel that it’s just a mud bath,’” Aslima offers, “‘I feel like we’re clean pigs.’”108 His culminating choice of dirty money over purifying lust makes for Romance’s saddest tragedy. The waning of compulsory heterosexuality, the novel submits, might relax compulsory able-bodiedness inside and outside the bedroom. As the novel’s last ship sails, however, McKay’s disabled protagonist has elected the less sensuous, less virtuous path.

  Fortunately, McKay did not destroy “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” though he did wrestle with aspects of its cleanly piggish erotic scenes.109 First and foremost, he faced the challenge of devising a romantic lead whose disability was based on one or more cases well-known to him while remote from his own bodily history. In 1923, McKay had spent six weeks in a Paris clinic under treatment for syphilis, and his bedridden convalescence there informs the opening hospital chapters of “The Jungle and the Bottoms.” Slow-boiling health problems derived from his venereal disease, exacerbated by its debilitating treatment with mercury, mounted as McKay pursued the novel, and forced him in 1930 into painful spinal tap surgery in Berlin.110 Lafala’s infirmity was of a different order and location than his own, however, and McKay was at times unsure of his ability to give it life. An “amputated man” was a full-blown departure from Jake Brown, the footloose hero of Home to Harlem, and from practically the whole vagabond society of Banjo’s black “beach boys.” McKay was among the New Negro authors most identified with black male vitality, his early fiction elevating a still-primal black manhood above an emasculating West to overturn the venerable racist opposition between the civilized and the primitive. Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and other originators of Négritude were not alone in memorizing Banjo’s hymns to the superior vital force of black men.111 Yet in “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” McKay asked himself to inhabit a demobilized black male body, one whose taxing prosthetic travels would illuminate ableisms of race and sex, labor and capital, international imperialism and transatlantic black resistance. What Lennard J. Davis, one of the creators of disability studies, describes as the moral of “dismodernism” also summarizes a lesson that “The Jungle” intuited but rather struggled to express: “Impairment is the rule, and normalcy is the fantasy. Dependence is the reality, and independence grandiose thinking.”112

  When McKay first put aside “The Jungle and the Bottoms” in June 1930, the impairing effects of syphilis were one culprit. (His disease and its dire treatment, he wrote his agent, had become “something terribly real.”113) Another reason for quitting the book was Harper editor Eugene Saxton’s ongoing doubt, which led McKay to sift through “the novel again more critically,” and decide “that the whole second half”114 needed work. The self-imposed distraction of a book of short stories, what became McKay’s 1932 collection Gingertown, was the final straw. Gingertown’s exploration of another prose genre, McKay wrote to William Aspenwall Bradley, would show “that I am a writer of many moods and open the way for any book on any theme I may choose to write.”115 Attempting to persuade McKay to return to “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” judging it flawed but still viable, Bradley warned that short story collections rarely sold.116 But an obstinately freelance writer, most headstrong when cornered, failed to take his agent’s advice. As both Saxton and Bradley predicted, Gingertown was a commercial failure, earning nothing for either Harper or its author.117 Though the book did better with the critics, some important reviews slighted McKay as démodé. Writing in the New York Herald Tribune Books supplement, the witty Harlem novelist Rudolph Fisher implied that the long-absent Jamaican had lost touch with black New York’s evolving modernisms. The “robust vigor” of Home to Harlem and Banjo was still there in quantity, Fisher allowed, but the collection’s suite of Harlem stories was set in a New York in name only, an illusory place where “strange West-Indianisms” were placed in the “mouths of American blacks.”118 In short, the collection suffered from making Black Manhattan another version of McKay’s multilingual Black Marseille.

  As the Gingertown disappointment swelled, McKay took his character Lafala’s cue and pursued his favorite remedy for disenchantment: migration. He returned to Tangier, Morocco, and, flouting the French colonizer’s rules on the habitation of non-Moroccans, moved into a small house outside the intensely watched International Zone. Transforming the place from an “old barn without doors” into a “very habitable” home took time and “the best part”119 of his remaining assets, McKay reported. A unified, pot-boiling novel—not stories of many moods—was thus required if he was to maintain his new dwelling with “a most lovely view of the sea.”120

  Rather than taking the simplest step (seldom McKay’s first move) and returning to his shelved Marseille manuscript, however, he launched a new novel set in Jamaica, eventually published by Harper & Row in 1933. This novel’s title, Banana Bottom, obviously borrows from that of “The Jungle and the Bottoms.” Less plainly, McKay’s unanticipated fascination with Aslima, depicted as a former child prostitute in “The Jungle,” factored into his decision to focus on a sexually abused female protagonist, Bita Plant. Invisible to most every reader of Banana Bottom was the stress added to McKay’s writing life by surveillance from French intelligence agents and British operatives, a bitter encore of earlier harassment from the American FBI. During the worst of the scrutiny, McKay’s old house was burglarized, and his passport taken, in dodgy circumstances. By the time he received a new passport, biographer Wayne F. Cooper tells us, “the chief English consul in Tangier had removed from it his right to travel in the territories of the British Empire.”121 McKay could thus go home to Harlem, as he did in 1934, but never again to the Jamaican birthplace in which he situated Bita Plant’s life story.

  Soon after New Year’s Day, 1933, awaiting news of sales and reviews of Banana Bottom, McKay at last resumed work on “The Jungle and the Bottoms.” Recognizing that he should avoid a duplication of Banana
Bottom’s “bottom” in the title, he renamed the book “Savage Loving.” And, following through, the name of his Marseille neighborhood—the “Bottoms,” in the previous draft—became “Quayside.” The spicy “Savage Loving” was also chosen to make a marketable impression. McKay had a new representative, moreover, to peddle his newly titled novel. Resentful of Bradley’s lack of enthusiasm for Gingertown, he had replaced him with John Trounstine, a New York–based literary agent McKay met in Tangier with Paul Bowles in 1932.122 One of Trounstine’s first duties, unfortunately, was to deliver a “knock-out blow”123 to his client, news that Banana Bottom had fared no better than Gingertown. “Evidently my readers prefer my realism of rough slum life [over that] of rural life,” McKay groused in a letter to Max Eastman. Again lifting himself off the canvas, McKay concluded that he had no choice but to “supply the need”124 for his rugged urban realism. Here, then, was further reason to bury the title “The Jungle and the Bottoms.” “Savage Loving” was both more suggestive and less primitively pastoral.

  One of the weightiest revisions McKay tackled on “Savage Loving” was the addition of Big Blonde. As his name underscores, this “firm-footed, broad-shouldered,” and “splendidly built”125 specimen is larger than life, a specifically working-class American émigré whose status as a socialist colossus is barely undercut by his lack of “interest in the workers’ unions.”126 An oversized propaganda drawing in the novel’s Communist Seamen’s Club, hung under smaller photographs of Marx and Lenin, mirrors Big Blonde’s heroic proletarian heft and easy intimacy with black working men. In the drawing, a pair of “terrible giants, one white, the other black,” braced “themselves to break the chains that bound them. And under the drawing was an exhortation: ‘Workers of the World, Unite to Break Your Chains!’”127 Big Blonde can be said to take this famous exhortation, a popularization of the final lines of The Communist Manifesto, as literal writ. He enters McKay’s novel just in time to free his black radical pal St. Dominique from the clutches of an enraged mob. And he does such chain-breaking work in full ownership of the feminizing e at the end of his name. McKay’s character tips his hat to the less intrepid female heroine of Dorothy Parker’s story “Big Blonde,” not coincidentally published in 1929. Parker appreciated McKay’s fiction, praising Home to Harlem for “putting even further in their place the writings of Mr. Carl Van Vechten,”128 above all the white Negro’s cluelessly titled novel Nigger Heaven (1926). McKay returned the favor in Romance, whose Big Blonde seconds Parker’s in savoring the power to incite “some men when they use the word ‘blonde’ to click their tongues and wag their heads roguishly.”129 With his variation on a Big Blonde theme, McKay makes a fearless butch-femme out of the socialist-realist ideal of the hammer-swinging male proletarian.

  During the “Savage Loving” stage of revision, McKay also pressed forward on the scheme he had laid out in his December 1929 letter to Bradley. For a change, he would compose a Marseille novel avec plot. Political allegories attached to Big Blonde and St. Dominique would not be pinned to a merely episodic arrangement, McKay ensured, adding more than ten new chapters that kept the story flowing. A willing publisher still proved a hard target, however. After the failure of Banana Bottom, Harper & Brothers refused to sign another contract with him.130 Alfred A. Knopf agreed to consider the novel, but from their perspective, perhaps tainted by considering “Color Scheme” almost a decade prior, “Savage Loving” appeared “crudely thrown together and strangely dated in depression-ridden New Deal America.”131 Closer to the end of his rope, McKay once more wrote to Max Eastman for advice. Unsure of his ability to approximate the tastes of contemporary publishers, McKay’s oldest sounding board punted the task to Clifton Fadiman, an experienced reader for Simon & Schuster. The result was the opposite of encouraging. Fadiman intensely disliked “Savage Loving,” judging that “McKay is trying to work a Hemingway on material to which Hemingway is not adapted.”132 The Sun Also Rises, it seems, had better framed the scene of Lost Generation refugees trapped between alcoholic hilarity and primal struggles over love and loss. In the most crushing blow, Fadiman demeaned McKay’s novel as “sex hash” without redeeming literary merit.133

  While we tend to think of the Lost Generation and the Harlem Renaissance as discrete, even antagonistic schools of interwar literature, Fadiman’s detection of Hemingway’s imprint on “Savage Loving” in fact was warranted. Like the Papa of American minimalism, McKay lived and wrote as an expatriate, primarily in Paris, during most of the 1920s. While it is unknown if the two modernists’ paths crossed on the Left Bank, McKay certainly respected the Hemingway style. In his 1937 memoir, A Long Way from Home, McKay confessed to “a vast admiration for Ernest Hemingway as a writer.”134 His comments on Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925), “that thin rare book of miniature short stories,” include the cherished memory of receiving as a gift a first edition at the Café du Dôme: “My hand trembled to take it. . . . I have it still. It became so valuable that I once consigned it for a loan. But I redeemed it, and, excepting my typewriter, I hardly ever trouble to redeem the things I own.”135 When he speaks of The Sun Also Rises, McKay unwraps a metaphor that echoes Hemingway’s stylistic pugilism: “When Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises, he shot a fist in the face of the false romantic-realists and said, ‘You can’t fake about life like that.’”136 Nonetheless, A Long Way from Home takes the trouble of rejecting Fadiman’s charges that McKay was a Hemingway mimic: “Some of my critics thought that I was imitating him. But I am also a critic of myself. And I fail to find any relationship between my loose manner and subjective feeling in writing and Hemingway’s objective and carefully stylized form.”137

  If Fadiman missed the measure of literary value in “Savage Loving,” he was onto something respecting Hemingway’s imprint on the novel. The McKay prose that grew into Romance in Marseille is in fact some of his least “loose” and most Hemingwayesque. Its third-person narration swells into a number of figurative dream sequences in free-indirect style, but elsewhere favors a brisk, “objective” concision. Tight, tough talk in relatively short, declarative sentences—the voice of the Black Renaissance gone proto-noir—is a Romance rule less scrupulously observed in Banjo or Home to Harlem. “‘There’ll be lots of people trying to get on to you,’ said the nurse,” runs a typical exchange. “‘They won’t find me easy though,’ said Lafala. ‘I’ve lost my legs but not my head.’”138 Pile-ups of unadorned saids suggest another Hemingway nod. Beyond the similarities in prose style, Lafala’s symbolically rich amputation is of course a cousin to Jake Barnes’s Great War castration. Like The Sun Also Rises, Romance’s narrative stems from a modern male body shorn of vital parts. Along with the indelible character of Porgy, the lovesick African American beggar with “inadequate nether extremities”139 introduced in DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel of the same name, Hemingway’s hero is Lafala’s most important fictional predecessor.

  Fadiman’s ungenerous remarks on “Savage Loving” also accurately warned of New York publishing’s continued wariness of modernist obscenity, real and imputed. His dismissal of the novel’s “sex hash” must have reminded McKay of Eugene Saxton’s suspicion that “The Jungle and the Bottoms” was, as Gertrude Stein deemed Hemingway’s short story “Up in Michigan,” “inaccrochable”140: unmarketable due to its ostensible indecency. McKay knew the high stakes of American obscenity law as a book buyer as well as a book writer. In 1927, Harold Jackman, the chic companion of the Harlem poet Countee Cullen, wrote McKay in Paris, hoping that he might send back a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, then banned in the United States. Jackman mailed McKay a money order and instructions on how to ship the book, a “stunt” he had learned from mutual friend Gwendolyn Bennett. While living in Paris on scholarship during the mid-1920s, Bennett had smuggled a disguised edition to her U.S. home address. The best method, she advised Jackman and Jackman advised McKay, was to remove the novel’s cover and first two pages. A “dummy” cover could then be attached, ensuring that U.
S. customs agents were none the wiser. The detached book jacket and title pages would arrive in a separate package, and Ulysses could be reassembled.141

  The liberation of Joyce’s mega-novel from such minor plots would come in December 1933, when District Judge John M. Woolsey decided in favor of its “serious experiment”142 in the celebrated case of United States v. One Book Called Ulysses. But Woolsey’s blow for free expression did not arrive in time to keep Countee Cullen from advising, long-distance, that “Savage Loving” was burdened by a risqué title begging for censorship. In June 1933, McKay complained to Eastman that Cullen had convinced Trounstine, McKay’s new agent, that his book-in-progress “sounded obscene.”143 An aging New Negro prodigy whom McKay condemned as “that little prig”144 thus provoked his novel’s final name change. During the summer of 1933, or soon after, “Savage Loving” went undercover as Romance in Marseille, and Cullen effectively had the last word on the title of McKay’s last expatriate fiction.

  The new and less dangerous title was insufficient to convince McKay that he would make a success of Romance in Marseille. His final year in Morocco was plagued by colonial authorities and mounting health problems, and little in the reaction to his developing novel argued that it would ease his financial distress. In August 1933, he lost the lease on his seafront home outside the French-policed International Zone, and was forced to sell his furnishings in Tangier’s “native market.”145 “I won’t be able to carry on [writing] with a sure hand,” McKay wrote Eastman, “until I hear from you or some other good critic that I am on the right track.”146 No encouraging word arrived, and by October, McKay was without “a sou”147 and close to collapse. “Aframerica” called out to him for the first time in more than a decade, principally because Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and other patrons of the Depression-slowed Harlem Renaissance promised to raise money for his ticket to New York. “New York is your market,” Johnson assured him, “and the United States is your field. Furthermore, we, the Negro writers, need you here.”148 The odds are that McKay put his final stamp on the completed typescript of Romance in Marseille in the late fall or early winter of 1933, rushing to beat a boat to the United States he boarded in January 1934—legally embarking on the ocean crossing his character Lafala had taken illicitly but just as necessarily.