Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission. Or was the publisher, Penguin Classics, merely protecting itself from hypothetical complaints? Mostly because Romance in Marseille plays it safe in no other ways. Well, I made my bed. Lafala is a sailor born in West Africa an unspecified part of it who moves to the port of Marseille and gets fleeced by a Moroccan prostitute. Filled with self-loathing over the incident, he stows away on a ship to New York but is caught and imprisoned next to a toilet, where he gets frostbite.
Upon arrival, both lower legs have to be amputated. Lafala receives a windfall and heads back to Marseille to take up a footless moneyed version of dockside life β and to locate the treacherous siren who jilted him. The book is newly available, but McKay, who died in , started writing it 91 years ago.
First the book was called The Jungle and the Bottoms. The manuscript was abandoned for a couple of years while the author suffered from syphilis and other distractions. Then he moved to Morocco and took it up again, reworking the story and retitling it Savage Loving.
This he swapped for the current title after his agent deemed Savage Loving too obscene, before abandoning the novel again, seemingly for good, in McKay barely mentioned it in his memoir and apparently forgot about the project entirely until an page draft popped up again in the hands of a collection to which McKay had donated his papers. He was not an ardent organizer of his own work.
The two have now been reconciled for the first time to yield the book as published. Romance in Marseille , in other words, was never actually a lost or forgotten novel; it was just peculiarly hard to track down.
