McKay, Claude. Romance in Marseille

Abstract

The discovery and subsequent publication for the first time in 2017 of Claude McKay’s lost manuscript, Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem, has led to renewed interest in the seminal Harlem Renaissance writer’s life and work. But anyone who has read Amiable with Big Teeth, and the more recently published Romance in Marseille (2020), must acknowledge the remarkably prescient nature of both texts, and their relevance to 21st-century readers. McKay’s narratives deftly weave social reality with political commentary and are filled with rich characters whose stories and struggles invite further reflection. Unlike Amiable with Big Teeth, Romance in Marseille was never a lost text because its two manuscript versions, although unpublished, were known to scholars. This book was written, rewritten, and abandoned by McKay at the height of the Jazz Age, thus preserving almost as if in a time capsule, the complexities of racial & sexual identities, radical politics, and disability in this period. It may simply be a sign of our times but, unusually, when readers open to the first page of the introduction to Romance in Marseille, editors Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell (both scholars of African American literature) warn of spoilers: “New readers are advised that this introduction makes details of the plot explicit” (vii). The plot certainly twists as it follows the very few ups and very many downs in the life of Lafala, a West African merchant seaman whose (mis)adventures introduce us to an international cast including Moroccan courtesans, French pimps, and Caribbean Marxists in the Vieux Port of Marseille. Gay and lesbian relationships are an accepted and quotidian aspect of life in the Quayside neighborhood where Lafala and his associates spend most of their days and nights. For the bisexual McKay, love was simply love, perhaps a source of discomfort for the literary agents and editors of the 1930s who continuously refused to publish this story. McKay changed his novel’s title three times before deserting it, settling on Romance in Marseille in an effort to appease those editors and literary agents who had bristled at the overt sexuality in the original title, The Jungle and the Bottoms, and its more explicit successor, Savage Loving. But this book, at heart, is a love story, so the title is apt. Love and the quest for it drives McKay’s narrative. It was North African prostitute Aslima’s humiliating betrayal of Lafala that led him to stow away from Marseille on an ocean liner bound for North America. He was swiftly discovered by the ship’s crew, confined to a cramped toilet where he suffered severe frostbite, an allusion to the horrors of the previous century’s trans-Atlantic slave trade, and was forced into a double leg amputation upon arriving in New York. Showing off the money he had surprisingly won in a lawsuit against the shipping company brought a disabled Lafala back to Marseille, in an effort to regain Aslima’s affections in spite of her treachery. There is also the love between Big Blonde, a burly white longshoreman who is besotted with a