42 The New York Review
Romance in Marseille
by Claude McKay, edited and
with an introduction by Gary Edward
Holcomb and William J. Maxwell.
Penguin, 165 pp., $16.00 (paper)
The peripatetic writer Claude McKay
was born in Jamaica in 1889 but made
in Harlem. As he wrote in his memoir,
A Long Way from Home (1937), noth-
ing came close to its “hot syncopated
fascination.” His time there was heady
and fortuitous. It was a period, recalled
Langston Hughes, “when the Negro
was in vogue,” and a number of com-
petitors battled for the souls of black
folk. They included wealthy, exotic-
seeking white voyeurs and Afrophilic
benefactors; the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored Peo-
ple (NAACP), which aimed to marshal
the arts into the service of civil rights;
the Universal Negro Improvement
Association, Marcus Garvey’s pan-
Africanist back- to- Africa movement;
and the Communists, who, in opposi-
tion to Garvey’s “race first” doctrine,
argued that the working class, no mat-
ter their color, should put “class first.”
These groups prized McKay as
someone who might come to personify
their ideals. He’d left Jamaica in 1912
to attend the Tuskegee Institute in Ala-
bama. Shortly afterward he transferred
to Kansas State College, then aban-
doned his studies there, and eventually
he made his way to New York in 1914,
eking out a living through poorly paid
jobs, including as a railroad dining car
waiter.
Within a few years of arriving in the
“Negro metropolis,” McKay had won
many admirers. A sensuous poet and
fiery aesthete, he became renowned
for “If We Must Die,” his defiant poem
written during the violent race riots of
1919, in which whites attacked blacks
across the US. Even so, he cast him-
self as an outsider. Though dismissive
of literary politics, he was competitive
rather than collegial toward the home-
grown luminaries of the inchoate Har-
lem literary movement. By 1922, the
year he published the poetry collection
Harlem Shadows, the newly anointed
darling of the African- American li-
terati found his fascination with the
movement beginning to wane; he
felt the need to escape from its vex-
ing limitations, from “the pit of sexand poverty... from the cul- de- sac of
self pity... [and] from the suffocating
ghetto of color consciousness.”
McKay’s poetic talent had first been
spotted when he was a teenager in Ja-
maica; now he was thirty- two, still
dependent on his wits and on patrons
whose nurturing hands he’d often
threatened to bite. Nevertheless, inthe summer of 1922 literary friends
passed the hat to provide financing for
the notorious ingrate’s next adventure.
McKay was bound again for Europe—
first to Russia, as a visitor to the Fourth
Congress of the Communist Interna-
tional, where he met Leon Trotsky and
found himself, to the chagrin of the
jealous American delegation, unex-
pectedly lionized:The photograph of my black face
was everywhere among the highest
Soviet rulers... adorning the walls
of the city. I was installed in one
of the most comfortable and best
heated hotels in Moscow.He spent more than a decade in Eu-
rope and Morocco but would not always
be so comfortable; his time there was
punctuated by ill health and other priva-
tions. He was hospitalized and treated
for syphilis in Paris. Bordering on
penury, he picked up piecemeal work,
sometimes as a nude model. He stopped
short, though, of debasing himself, re-
jecting a lucrative offer of a job described
in A Long Way from Home as “an oc-
casional attendant in a special bains
de vapeur,” or steam bath. He did not
spell out what the work might entail but
found the thought of it repugnant: “My
individual morale was all I possessed. I
felt that if I sacrificed it to make a little
extra money, I would become person-
ally obscene.” Later, McKay wended
his way to Marseille, where he was
drawn into a “colored colony” of expat
West Indians, African- Americans, and
Africans around the Vieux Port. He
felt immediately at home:It was a relief to get to Marseilles,
to live among a great gang of black
and brown humanity.... [Their]
Negroid features and complex-
ions, not exotic, creating curiosity
and hostility, but unique and nat-
ural to a group. The odors of dark
bodies sweating through a day’sOn the Waterfront
Colin Grant
drinking water and developing breast
cancer, they can look back and thank
Baker Hughes and Susan G. Komen.”
“You will understand, I hope,” writes
Boyer, “that because of all of this,
every pink ribbon looks like the flag of
a conqueror stuck in a woman’s grave.”
As I moved through The Undying,
I began to comprehend why the book
is as various and fragmented as it is.
Early on, Boyer argues that “breast
cancer is a disease that presents itself
as a disordering question of form,” and
the form of the book itself reflects that
disorder. How does one give shape to
something shapeless, give language to
the invisible? How does one tell a story
without ignoring all the many threads
and tangles that have created it, with-
out ignoring all the stories that aren’t
being told? “How could I write about
the world as it is,” Boyer says, “when it
is the same world that was guilty of this
body (mine), which in all of its senses
felt only like the animate form of its
own betrayal?”
There are passages in the book that
drift far enough away from the con-
crete that they become less effective,
as in the section called “Wasted Life,”
an exploration of exhaustion that in-
cludes next to no specific details. The
language here gets very abstract (“Fate
was shipwrecked, so in its place, they
sent us agency.... In this version of
freedom, the invisibility of all fences
is the point of every invisible fence”),
and the reader begins to lose focus.
But Boyer seems to anticipate our re-
sponse: “Exhaustion is boring, requires
no genius, is democratic in practice,
lacks fans. In this, it’s like experimen-
tal literature.”
An important moment is almost bur-
ied in the section immediately before.
Boyer returns to the cancer pavilion,
to an open room filled with patients,
where the nurses always told her that
the needle injecting her chemotherapy
drugs was going to be painless (“a pres-sure”) “while my body reacted visibly
with pain.” Boyer refuses the platitude,
telling the nurses, “It hurts,” and her
vocalization causes other patients to
speak up as well:“You’re right,” said a fellow pa-
tient, a woman, watching. “It really
does hurt,” said a man surrounded
by his adult children, all of us in
the infusion room then all joining
together to say that what appears
to hurt actually does hurt so that
no one would ever again say while
they were hurting us that what
really hurt us—hurt all of us—
never did.Though The Undying refuses to be
another uplifting illness narrative, I
find hope in this scene—in the sound
of one voice speaking up to expose a
lie, and encouraging others to join to-
gether against it. Boyer is angry, and
she makes it clear that all of us should
be. The Undying is slippery and elu-sive in its very form, and you come
away feeling that the book itself en-
capsulates the frustration with the in-
adequacies of our existing modes for
tackling anything of this size. “I hate
to accept, but do,” Boyer writes, “that
cancer’s near-criminal myth of singu-
larity means any work about it always
resembles testimony.” She is aware that
on some level, she can’t avoid her status
as a breast cancer “survivor.” Though
there is a quest here, Boyer’s seems to
be not for meaning but instead for a
narrative that reveals the chaos all of
our narratives are a part of. A work
about breast cancer, Boyer concludes,will be judged by its veracity or
its utility or its depth of feeling
but rarely by its form, which is its
motor and its fury, which is a re-
cord of the motions of a struggle
to know, if not the truth, then the
weft of all competing lies.(^) Q
Claude McKay, France, 1928
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