by James Sallis
Chester Himes
a life
James Sallis
Contents
Introduction
1. Unnatural Histories
2. 59623
3. “One Way to Be a Nigger”
4. The Things a Writing Man Will Do
5. Round Us Bark the Mad and Hungry Dogs
6. “I’m Still Here”
7. A Street He Could Understand
8. Going Too Far and Too Far Gone
9. “I Don’t Have That Much Imagination”
10. Literature Will Not Save You
11. European Experience
12. Story-Shaped Life
13. Doubt, Passion, the Madness of Art
14. Beautiful White Ruins of America
15. A Serious Savage
16. A New Intelligence
17. Gone So Long
18. Black Ruins of My Life
19. The Bad Mother
20. “I Never Found a Place I Fit”
Works by Chester Himes
Acknowledgments
Plate Section
Notes
Selected Bibliography
By the Same Author
To Lesley Himes
and in memory of Chester
Introduction
It is exceedingly strange to know so well a man one has never met. For a year and a half now my days have been spent in the company of Chester Himes. He had of course been with me, though not so intimately, far longer. I began reading Himes thirty years ago, first wrote of him some sixteen or seventeen years back. My own series of detective novels (one of them dedicated to his memory, in another of which Himes actually appears) began in part as homage.
I first came to Himes in the late sixties, in the wake of a newfound fascination with crime fiction. Introduced to Chandler and Hammett by Mike Moorcock while in London editing New Worlds magazine and having read their entire output in short order, upon returning to the States I looked about for more. On shelves at a friend’s house I came across several paperbacks by Chester Himes. They were small books, wafer thin, with limp cardboard covers; a decade before, they had sold for thirty-five cents. I read them and went looking for others. As is my habit, I also tried to find out about the author of these strange, savagely comic novels, but no one seemed to know anything of him. A couple of years later the movie of Cotton Comes to Harlem arrived. I saw it while living in New York City, stepping over homeless folk asleep in the doorway as I came back at night to my downtown apartment.
For a time then, I didn’t read Himes, and when again I felt the pull (for, perennially, his work collects me back to itself), his books had become difficult to find. Virtually all were—again—out of print. Haunting used bookstores, I unearthed ravaged copies of For Love of Imabelle, The Crazy Kill, The Big Gold Dream. I unearthed also, in time, Pinktoes, If He Hollers Let Him Go—and something titled The Primitive. This last, which I found and still find profoundly unsettling, certainly like nothing I had read before, I’ve since come to regard as one of America’s great novels.
What I discovered was that Himes had a second or more accurately a first career as a “literary” writer, beginning with stories published in Esquire in the company of such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Ring Lardner, and Bertrand Russell. He had written those Esquire stories, moreover, while in prison. A much-acclaimed first novel was followed by two or three others. Then Chester Himes had fallen off the edge of the earth, sending back one last urgent message, The Primitive, a novel written not in fire, but in the glare and dead-white light of too many three o’clock mornings. No one I spoke to had ever read it.
Himes had not dropped off the face of the earth, of course, but had gone to Europe to write his detective stories, and as I read backward from them through the earlier books, then on into the two-volume autobiography, my picture of Himes changed radically. I’d begun seeing him simply as an extension of American crime fiction, one of the first great documenters of the inner city, but increasingly I came to perceive him as I do now: as America’s central black writer. Himes stood squarely at the crossroad of tradition and innovation, shaking together in his mix remains of the Harlem Renaissance, the energies of newly developing genre fictions, African-American tropes, and arealist storytelling styles, the found life of the streets about him. Again and again he told his story of great promises forever gone unfulfilled, of men who perish from hunger in the shadow of statues of plenty and perish from lack of thought in the shade of great ideas, creating a literature in its absolute individuality, in its strange power and quirkiness, in its cruelty and cockeyed compassion, ineffably American.
Chester Himes was, or could be, a difficult man; he remains a difficult writer. Offering up little comfort or safe ground to the ideologue, he stood, sometimes by choice, always by inclination, at a hard right angle to the world. Nothing in his world is simple, nothing there can be taken for granted, ever. Neither he nor his characters fulfill our expectations. One moment likable, the next despicable, they refuse to behave as we wish them to; they are their own worst enemies as much as they are (and they are all) victims. The sources of their rage are deep, irrational, unquenchable. As readers we are, as Himes intended, forever off balance. The work gets to us. It’s unsettling, disconcerting, upsetting—more Do the Right Thing than The Color Purple, as critic Gerald Houghton has put it, and as a quote from Himes’s first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, demonstrates:
Reactionaries hate the truth and the world’s rulers fear it; but it embarrasses the liberals, perhaps because they can’t do anything about it.
Biography at once can be, perhaps must be, an act of admiration and a betrayal. Certainly in some regard it violates its subject, distorting and simplifying, forcing complex events, thoughts, and actions into superficial patterns, seeking to sweep up thousands of shimmering, mobile, living moments in its nets. As biographers we take our brief from Goethe:
For it seems to be the main object of biography—to exhibit the man in relation to the features of his time, and to show to what extent they have opposed or favored his progress; what view of mankind and the world he has formed from them, and how far he himself, if an artist, poet, or author, may externally reflect them.
Yet even Freud believed biographical truth unattainable. The biographer, he held, pledges himself to tell and to countenance lies, to become the hypocrite, to cover things up or paint them in glowing colors. “Remember that what you are told is really threefold,” Nabokov warns us in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, “shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.” Or as Stanislaw Lem considers in His Master’s Voice. “With sufficient imagination one might easily write a dozen, three dozen, versions of any life, a union of sets in which the facts would be the only elements in common.”
Finally, then, the biographer’s brief, like that of the novelist or poet, is to construct not an imitation of the world but an alternate for it, a stand-in, an understudy, a fictio—from the Latin: a shaping. To do this he must not only select more or less arbitrarily from the vast array of data available but also invent structures that will hold those selections in place.
Properly speaking, biography is a subgenre of history, literary biography its bastard offspring in that it is precisely literature that forever seeks to correct history, to allay its indifference to the individual, its smothering generalities, what we would call in the human being its lack of affect.
“It is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to lead one,” Lytton Strachey declared. As writers we finish each book knowing we’ve failed yet again to bring down that vision of which we caught so many glimpses sitting alone in our rooms late at night or in the dull, repetitious purr of dawn. The whole time we biographers are at
work, four years, or ten, or eighteen months, we wrestle with the angels of art and try to hold at bay the devils of history, waging war, as much as with the material given us, with “our own defenses and blocked memories and self-deceptions.” That last is from Leon Edel, and it’s the magnificent, sustaining example of his Henry James that I’ve tried to keep in mind through these months of absorption.
Time now to gather up this poor little thing from the filing cabinet atop which it’s lived all these months, fattening daily, and send it out into the world.
Here, then, is my version of one man’s reality, Chester Himes as I’ve come to know him. And yet, for all this, he remains a mystery, as we must, all of us, remain mysteries to one another. For it is in that very search, in trying to know the other, that all our art begins and ends.
It is exceedingly strange to know so little, finally, about a man with whom you have spent so much time.
1
Unnatural Histories
“That’s my life—the third generation out of slavery,”1 Chester Himes ended his 1976 autobiography, a book striking off in so many directions, encompassing so much, that it seems one life could never have contained all this.
Almost thirty years before, in a speech before a mixed audience at the University of Chicago on “The Dilemma of the Negro Writer in the United States,” sounding remarkably like one of his models, Faulkner, Himes had written:
There is an indomitable quality within the human spirit that cannot be destroyed; a face deep within the human personality that is impregnable to all assaults … we would be drooling idiots, dangerous maniacs, raving beasts—if it were not for that quality and force within all humans that cries “I will live.”2
Himes knew a great deal about such assaults—about assaults of every sort. Champion Ishmael Reed3 reminds us that by the time Himes reached the age of nineteen, he’d suffered more misfortune than most people experience in a lifetime. Already Himes had survived his parents’ contempt and acrimony for one another, his father’s slow slide into failure’s home plate, his mother’s crippling blend of pride and self-hatred, the childhood blinding of brother Joe for which he felt responsible, subterranean life among Cleveland’s gamblers, hustlers, and high rollers, and, finally, a forty-foot plunge down an elevator shaft that crushed vertebrae, shattered bones, and, though he recovered, left him in a Procrustean brace for years and in pain for the remainder of his life. He’d go on to survive eight years in a state prison, early acclaim as a writer followed by attacks and, far worse, indifference, an ever-mounting sense of failure and frustration, tumultuous affairs leading in one case almost to murder, and, as Himes never lets us forget, a lifetime of pervasive, inescapable racial prejudice.
Hardly a representative life? Actually, “for all its inconsistencies, its contradictions, its humiliations, its triumphs, its failures, its tragedies, its hurts, its ecstasies and its absurdities,”4 it is.
In prison Himes had come to believe that people will do anything, absolutely anything. “Why should I be surprised when white men cut out some poor black man’s nuts, or when black men eat the tasty palms of white explorers?”5 This belief, along with his own inner turmoil, accounts in large part for the level of violence and abrupt shifts of plot in his work, not to mention the absurd comedy, that so distinguish it. We grow to expect sudden desperate acts from characters who in fact often seem little more than a series of such acts strung together. Pianos and drunken preachers may fall from the sky, children may be fed from troughs like barnyard animals, stolen automobile wheels may roll on their own through most of Harlem, precipitating a chain of unrelated, calamitous events. In Himes’s absurd world, Aristotelian logic holds no purchase; neither characters nor readers may rely on cause and effect. We can’t anticipate the consequences of acts, have no way to predict what might be around the next corner, on the next page. It could be literally anything. So we’re forever off balance, handholds having turned to razors, cups of wine to blood. We look out from eyes filled with a nebulous, free-floating fear that never leaves us. We can depend on nothing, expect anything. And nothing is safe.
Much like his work, Himes’s life is filled with contradictions and uncertainties, sudden turns, stabs of violence, dark centers at the heart of light. In his time he was no easy man to know; time’s filters haven’t changed that. There is so much of the life, so many things done, so many places lived, so many apparent selves and so rich an internal life, that, every bit as much as his fiction, Himes’s life seems always overblown, exaggerated, too vivid—as though all experience has been rendered down to one single dark, rich stock. One often feels that it is only the centripetal force of the tensions within him that keeps Himes’s world from flying wholly apart. He seems a man who must always work everything out for himself and by himself, creating self and world anew with each effort at understanding, “remaining always (in critic Gilbert Muller’s words) radical and unforgiving.”6
Whatever they and their jacket notes claim, the majority of writers lead dull lives. They spend much of their lives alone in rooms staring at blank pages or half-filled screens. When not in those rooms, they wander half-lost about the house, quarrel with wives and lovers, drink, worry about their work going out of print or not finding a publisher, read new books to see who might be getting a leg up on them, share with other writers complaints over the horrible state of publishing.
Himes’s life, on the other hand, is at least as fascinating as his fiction.
Autobiographical elements, of course, even appropriations of entire lives, are common in literature. Zuckerman is Roth in a funhouse mirror, Henry or Mr. Bones opens his mouth to let out John Berryman’s words, Joyce cocoons his childhood in the guise of Stephen Daedalus: artful dodgers all. So one hesitates to insist too closely upon the link between writer and written. Perhaps especially in the case of Himes one hesitates. His late memoirs are rife with conflation and confabulation, highly suspect. Memory at best is an uncertain instrument, and the two volumes of autobiography Himes wrote when well past sixty resound with errors of fact, skewed sequences, even incorrect dates for central experiences. Nor does Himes ever back away from adorning fact, sending it out dressed in Sunday best or in rags according to his need, so that often the books are more documents of his emotions and reactions, of states of mind, than they are a record of the life lived. By selection and emphasis, then, the memoirs become as fictive in their own way as his novel The Third Generation, which in turn seems as much masked autobiography as fiction. And who is this writer, so much like Himes yet clearly invented, darting and skittering and peering out through the pages of The Primitive?
When Himes spoke of The Third Generation as his “most dishonest novel,”7 it’s just this manifest use of fact to which he may have been referring, this sense that he had failed in some elementary manner the mandates of fiction. Here Himes is writing so close to his own life that only crawl spaces remain.
Himes’s life and fiction seem uniquely linked, then, if in complex ways, and his work, for all its apparent diversity, uniquely of a piece.
Chester Himes was no great thinker, never claiming a place among intellectuals. With a handful of exceptions, notably his 1948 speech at the University of Chicago, whenever he touched on ideas he spoke in commonplaces, and often as not what he shows in his work may subvert what he says. He was, however, a marvelous observer and prodigious inventor, working by instinct towards attainment of discoveries and a singular vision irreducible to mere ideas.
Himes could be shockingly unobservant, even unmindful, of his own life and motives. Repeatedly, he let himself drift or be drawn into impossible situations. There was about him often a baffling passivity, a disengagement, that reminds us he spent formative adult years in prison and clashes oddly with the man’s obvious passion. Again and again he voiced astonishment at actions or inactions that led (quite predictably, we should have thought) to disaster. Yet in his work he took close notice of the world from perspectives rarely encountered, convincing us with
the sheer physicality of his writing, spinning out scenes we’ve never read before. When Himes writes of Harlem, you see the cars sunk like elephants onto tireless front wheels, cafés with hand-lettered signs and hustlers in tight bunches on corners; smell rotting garbage, sweat, bad grease, the sweet stench of pomades. When he shows Bob Jones and Kriss awakening in If He Hollers Let Him Go and The Primitive, respectively, you feel what they feel, all the fear, self-hatred, and confusion beating at the inner walls of selves.
Critic James Lundquist has called the opening chapter of Blind Man with a Pistol, with its hundred-year-old “black Mormon” advertising for a new wife to keep the number at twelve, with its stinking stewpot of chicken’s feet and chitterlings and feeding troughs for children, “without exaggeration … one of the strangest in American literature.”8 The final scene of the same book, with Himes’s once-powerful detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson standing by helplessly shooting rats as full-scale riot breaks around them, is little less strange or memorable.
An hour later Lieutenant Anderson had Grave Digger on the radio-phone. “Can’t you men stop that riot?” he demanded.
“It’s out of hand, boss,” Grave Digger said.
“All right, I’ll call for reinforcements. What started it?”
“A blind man with a pistol.’
“What’s that?”
“You heard me, boss.”
“That don’t make any sense.”
“Sure don’t.”9
In the second volume of his autobiography, My Life of Absurdity, Himes describes “a painting I had seen in my youth of black soldiers clad in Union Army uniforms down on their hands and knees viciously biting the dogs the Southern rebels had turned on them, their big white dangerous teeth sinking into the dogs’ throats while the dogs yelped futilely.”10 That painting has always seemed profoundly emblematic of Himes’s work. The terrible ambivalence of the black’s place in society, Himes’s own bitterness and rage, elements of graphic violence and opéra bouffe—this brief description of a painting seen fleetingly in youth describes as well four decades of work from one of America’s most neglected and misunderstood major writers.
