A novel ahead of its time
Romance in Marseille Claude McKay Penguin
In recent years Claude McKay (1889-1948), one of the most gifted writers of the Harlem Renaissance, has been enjoying his own posthumous renaissance. In 2004, his Complete Poems appeared. In 2017, his final novel, Amiable With Big Teeth was published. And now, Penguin is bringing out the book McKay was working on in the early 1930s but abandoned because it was deemed too daring to print. Today, Romance in Marseille seems less shocking than strikingly woke, given that its themes include disability, the full spectrum of sexual preference, radical politics and the subtleties of racial identity.
The novel hooks the reader with its first sentence: “In the main ward of the great hospital Lafala lay like a sawed-off stump and pondered the loss of his legs.” A merchant seaman originally from West Africa, Lafala had till recently been living in Marseille, where he had fallen in love with a Middle Eastern prostitute named Aslima. After she absconded with all his money, he stowed away to New York, was discovered en route and quickly confined to a freezing water closet. By the time the ship landed, Lafala’s feet were so severely frostbitten they had to be amputated.
A fellow patient, nicknamed Black Angel, arranges for a lawyer to sue the shipping company. Surprisingly, the “ambulance chaser” wins the case and his client is awarded $100,000.
McKay soon makes clear that Lafala is untrustworthy — he only pays his lawyer half of what he owes him — and that he’s prone to suspicion and readily swayed by others. So while Lafala may be the book’s protagonist, he’s hardly what you’d call a hero. After being fitted with cork prostheses, though, Lafala is able to hobble around and quickly decides to return to Quayside, the book’s name for Marseille’s Vieux Port, then a multiracial, harbour-side neighbourhood of bars, brothels and violence.
Lafala re-initiates his love affair with Aslima. Sex between the two isn’t just animalistic — one rejected title for McKay’s novel had been Savage Loving — but “piggish.” As Aslima says, “We’ll be happy pigs together as often as I am free.” Surprisingly, McKay offers nothing more graphic than that rather unerotic image. Nonetheless, sex pervades the novel. We learn that Aslima’s rival sleeps with men for money but saves her “sugar” for a Greek girl. The most prominent white character, the longshoremen Big Blonde is infatuated with a pretty boy called Petit Frere. Neither of these liaisons is criticized or even commented on, they are simply regarded as personal choices.
The editors of Romance in Marseille — Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell, both professors of African-American studies — set the novel in its own time and establish its importance, in the words of the back-cover blurb, as “a pioneering novel of physical disability
... and one of the earliest queer fictions in the African-American tradition.”