Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  Claiming to be the lowest-paid writer on the face of the earth (“It’s pitiful, you know, it’s really pitiful, pitiful”), in a 1970 interview Himes told John A. Williams that again and again publishers had paid him a thousand-dollar flat fee, then turned around and sold rights for ten times that.

  Typical of many others, this interview is a corrida, an invitation to perform. Anyone often interviewed knows the tedium of repeating the same things yet again. Responses become reflex, formulaic, harden into icons. At the same time there’s an innate hyperbole to the whole process. Rooms become ever larger, situations more intense, moments of personal adventure more pointed. Himes approached interviews as opportunities for aggrandizement, as well he should—but also as another kind of fiction. He used interviews, as he used his work, for purposes of self-definition, to push shadows out of the circle, to hold the forces of self together. He is signifying, yes, but signifying around that hard knot of truth at the heart of the thing.

  Williams: Now wait a minute, Chester, people have known you since the forties. They know everything that you produced and they offered you a thousand-dollar advance for each of these three books?

  Himes: Oh, yes, that’s what they paid, a thousand-dollar advance.

  Williams: Goddamn!

  Himes: You talk about double standards. I find this quite annoying. Y’know, I have been in desperate circumstances financially, which everybody has known and they’ve just taken advantage of this—friends and enemies and everybody alike.18

  Back home, Williams tells him, young black writers always say Chester Himes has given away more books than most people have written.

  Himes: Now, I couldn’t find a publisher for The Primitive. I was very broke and desperate for some money, and I finally thought that I would send it to Weybright because they had begun to publish originals. So I sent it to Weybright, and Weybright wrote me this long letter about how we’ll pay you a thousand-dollar advance on this because we feel it’s best for the author to have a small advance and have substantial accruals [laughter]. I’ll never forget that phrase. I never got any accruals, substantial or otherwise, from that book [laughter].19

  Moving from job to job, writing when he could, Himes, a man who had difficulty keeping his balance at the best of times, tottered at the edge there at the edge of the continent, playing off his charge as husband and breadwinner against a compulsion to make his way and earn fame as a writer. Working in California for low wages at a succession of jobs he hated among people he considered bigots, Himes must have felt he was in training for a lifetime of mere subsistence. Whatever feelings of inadequacy or impending failure he harbored were intensified when Jean became employed, at much higher wages, as codirector of women’s activities for the eighteen Los Angeles area USOs, and Himes’s frustrations, for all the new ease of their life together, mounted. They lived in a comfortable house on a hill in the City Terrace area. Himes worked at the San Pedro shipyard and, after hours, at the writing of If He Hollers. His always vulnerable pride had taken a big hit, and thirty years later, when he wrote of it briefly in The Quality of Hurt, this still stung.

  It hurt me for my wife to have a better job than I did and be respected and included by her white co-workers, besides rubbing elbows with many well-to-do blacks of the Los Angeles middle class who wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole. That was the beginning of the dissolution of our marriage. I found that I was no longer a husband to my wife; I was her pimp. She didn’t mind, and that hurt all the more.20

  Himes’s feelings toward women were deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, reared as he was to middle-class values, he believed it was the man’s place to provide for and protect his woman. There loomed, however, the foundering, confounding example of his father. Built into that responsibility, too, was the desire to have women dependent upon him. On the other hand, for much of his life, in order to continue writing he used women, living off them (as Joe emphasized) just as he lived off and used others. Himes always claimed that his and Jean’s separation, when it came in 1952, arose from his inability to bear being supported by his wife. In reality it was another manifest of what we see often in Himes’s life, some long-smoldering ember suddenly bursting into flame—like people consumed by spontaneous combustion in Charles Brockden Brown novels.

  Chester did what writers too often must do, staying home to tend his small garden, becoming ever more inward in his self-obsession and ever more misanthropic, while Jean, flourishing, sallied out into the world. In his first novel Chester would lampoon the very people, those liberal whites and middle-class blacks, among whom she now made her life. Later still, with a slight dramatic pause before the word, a kind of catch, he would hint at the “friends” who had made all this possible for her, and of what she had made possible for them.

  In 1944 Molly Moon pulled strings to see that Himes received a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation, and Chester traveled to New York for publication of If He Hollers by Doubleday, Doran, and Company. He had written his bitter novel, he said, out of the accumulation of racial pain. He would make good use of his time among New York’s black intelligentsia years later in the satirical Pinktoes.

  Up to the age of thirty-one I had been hurt emotionally, spiritually, and physically as much as thirty-one years can bear: I had been kicked out of college, I had served seven and a half years in prison, I had survived the humiliating last five years of the Depression in Cleveland; and still I was entire, complete, functional; my mind was sharp, my reflexes were good, and I was not bitter. But under the mental corrosion of race prejudice in Los Angeles I had become bitter and saturated with hate. And finding myself unable to support my black wife, whom I loved desperately, I had become afraid. My wife deserved the support of her man. She was as beautiful and as feminine as a woman can be. I was thirty-one and whole when I went to Los Angeles and thirty-five and shattered when I left to go to New York.21

  I had become afraid.

  Fear is a part of what begins to surface now: Bob Jones comes awake in his room from yet another dream, fear carving its way along his spine; Kriss Cummings unfolds from the night in blind panic at finding herself alone; Jesse Robinson glances up expecting to see God’s piano hurtling down towards him. Fear comes up, in Himes’s life and the lives of his characters, like images swimming into being in a developing tray.

  5

  Round Us Bark the Mad and Hungry Dogs

  Stations rush by.

  Early in 1944 Doubleday accepted If He Hollers Let Him Go. Henry Moon, working as a reader for the publisher, may have influenced its decision. Doubleday wanted revisions, at any rate, and in May, presumably to talk these over, Himes visited New York.

  On the way back to L.A. he stopped in Chicago to meet Vandi Haygood, now administering the Rosenwald Foundation in her husband’s absence. Like many other young men of the time William Haygood was serving in the armed forces, and his wife had stepped in, in best Rosie-the-Riveter fashion (Rosie having come to life the year before as a Norman Rockwell cover for The Saturday Evening Post), to do his work. But the marriage, Vandi told Himes, was adrift. The ship had gone down. She and Bill were left together without provisions or sight of land on the life raft. Beginning a mutually destructive relationship that would continue sporadically over the next nine years, flaring up, coming under control, then breaking out again, a relationship that bore them to the border-crossing of madness and, in heart and mind if not in actuality, to murder—almost to the very comma and conversation as recounted in The Primitive (Chester later would say that of it all, only the murder was not true)—she and Chester passed the weekend together at her apartment.

  By September he was back in New York, alone metaphorically if not in fact. “I lost myself in sex and drunkenness,”1 he wrote. He was staying with the Moons, who now lived in central Harlem and whose parties gave ample opportunity to meet not only the intelligentsia he’d missed on his earlier junket, people such as labor leader Lester Granger of the Urban League, the NAACP’s Walter
White and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, but also a seemingly endless chorus line of available white women. Henry worked for both the NAACP and the CIO; Molly had recently been named director of the New York chapter of the Urban League; both were staunch supporters of a fourth term of office for Roosevelt, pursuit of which had become the North Star of liberal causes. Himes held, and so represented them in Pinktoes, that these parties existed not so much for political reasons as for the forging of interracial liaisons. Many of the white women whose bodies he accepted, Himes thought, tacitly identified dispensation of sexual favors with social reparation, throwing their bodies dramatically, Raleigh-like, over the gulf: just as foolishly. Water roared dark beneath these pale bridges. Chester Himes as man, as writer, was not being courted. Rather, with obeisance paid to some courtly image of his black, intelligent face, some icon of it, was he being patronized.

  One of those Himes met that fall in the whirl and dive of affairs was Ralph Ellison, intellectual, Communist, future author of Invisible Man, published in 1952, the same year as Himes’s Cast the First Stone.

  I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you sometimes see in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.2

  New York, far too eager to turn its mirrors on him, hurt him, Chester said. “I knew that, as much as I had been hurt by then, I was sick. But New York accepted me as normal, and that made me sicker.”3

  This was in The Quality of Hurt, 1976, thirty years after the fact. Four years before, for CBS, he recalled the descent to New York rather differently: how as he looked out on thrilling views from his bedroom window at the Moon’s apartment in Sugar Hill and strolled through fluttering Harlem streets, past Fat Man’s Bar at 155th or Eddie’s Chicken Shack, past barber shops and beauty parlors, the old Theresa Hotel at Seventh and 125th, he was the happiest man on earth, connected, electric, alive.

  One can easily imagine these two Chesters sitting across a table, some morning TV “cultural” talk show, debating one another.

  They so often did.

  Stations rush by. In our determination to understand—to invest the plod of our lives with substance, heft, form, at very least the appearance of same—metaphors accumulate, streets we can understand. Desire consumes our lives from within, silently, while out along the edge of the light, darkness waits its cue.

  Himes’s first arrival in New York, in May 1944, came one month before D day; his second, one month after Paris was retaken. Times fold easily at this seam, like an old letter. Impatient to get started, the fifties fired up in essence if not in fact late that year or early the next. Uncle Ike and Aunt Mamie, bland as pudding, were everywhere. Perry Como held sway. Four million TVs found their way into homes in 1950. Within the decade, paper-doll housing first developed by William J. Levitt as Levittown, Long Island, spread like mold. Thirteen million new homes came up in clumps and clusters and were called suburbs, communities cobbled together out of nothing, spun from white sugar and air, ex nihilo, wholly invented, more so than most novels, most fiction.

  As his November 1945 publication date approached, Himes grew ever more hopeful. The book might be chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection, he was told. Unquestionably it would win Doubleday’s George Washington Carver award, given to the best book of the year on Negro life. Advance orders of 10,000 copies were guaranteed. Chester always held that it could have been, would have been—sometimes, in later years, that it was—a best-seller.

  Lifelong friend Constance Webb Pearlstein, later Richard Wright’s biographer, recalls first meeting Himes at that time.

  I met Chester in 1945 at the home of Richard (Dick) Wright. His book, If He Hollers, was about to be published and, as I recall, Chester was hoping that it would be chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection. Wright had read the book and was enthusiastic. My impression of Chester was that he was tall and slim, extraordinarily handsome, and utterly charming. He seemed very gentle, but had a penetrating gaze. He had a humorous cast to his mouth, as if he saw something amusing, not in us, but in the world in which he lived. This of course he brought out later when he talked about the life of absurdity. His eyes also seemed to reflect this view; they seemed to sparkle with laughter. After Himes left, Wright put on a half gleeful, half supposedly mysterious expression and said that Himes had been in prison and was a killer. That he wouldn’t think twice about murdering someone. Wright loved to spin tales, sometimes to the point of believing them and half frightening himself.4

  “If He Hollers Let Him Go has most of the qualities that assure wide popular appeal,” Milliken writes: “an exciting backdrop, a fast pace, a tight plot, a smoothly fluid and readable style, and a hero who is easy to identify with.”5 On the other hand, he reasons, it is an angry and “bitterly indignant” book, qualities uncommonly associated with broad sales. Henry Moon, reading the novel in typescript, took objection to its frankness in a way that sums up the double bind affecting Himes: “Everything you say here is true, but these aren’t things that white people want to hear about. Things like this need to be kept quiet, between colored people.”6

  It is just at this point that variations on the word bitter (bitterness, bitterly) begin pushing themselves forward in all accounts of Himes’s life.

  The appearance of Himes’s first book, which should have marked a time of great joy in his life, Robert Skinner says, held more than its share of bitterness for him.7

  The whole episode left me bitter, Himes writes. And elsewhere: I had become so bitter I wished to change publishers.8

  The publication of his novel was only briefly a triumph, then a source of new and deeper bitterness, Milliken writes.9

  Bitterness welled up, it seemed, from the earth itself, touching everything. Beginning bad, 1945 ended worse. Journal of the siege year. Relations with the Moons had grown strained, perhaps because the cousins got into dispute over an employee of Henry’s whom Chester was dating, perhaps simply because Chester went on living off the Moons’ bounty. Chester and Jean made their way precariously through the year, often prevailing upon friends for a place to stay. When Estelle died, at seventy-one, they were too strapped to attend the funeral. Chester finally borrowed money from Van Vechten to get to Columbus. Jean remained behind.

  Himes says little of his mother’s death, as, typically, he says little of Jean’s supposed suicide attempt upon rejoining him in New York at the end of 1944 and finding him involved with other women.

  I lost myself in sex and drunkenness … I almost lost my wife, too. She came to New York and found me deeply involved in so many affairs that she tried to take her life. I was shocked back to normalcy, what was normalcy to me, and when I came to, If He Hollers Let Him Go had been published and well received.10

  Scant pages after sailing past Jean’s purported suicide attempt in half a sentence, he is describing at length the plumbing, repairs, neighbors, nests of rats and rattlesnakes at the California ranch to which they soon relocated, and the rifle he took along. Supposedly Jean suffered another crisis at the ranch after reading a draft of Lonely Crusade and believing herself the model for staid, color-conscious Ruth, fleeing into the desert afoot, stumbling along aimless and half-blind with shame, weeping.

  Chester would remember those days on the ranch as the best of his life, and write of them as pastoral.

  Despite the rattlesnakes and other minor nuisances, it had been a calm and creative period, and we had enjoyed making love in complete isolation, at any hour of day or night, to the constant sound of the wind in the leaves of the huge overhanging oak.11

  He was also buoyed by the fact th
at he’d again become the breadwinner, “something we both recognized and accepted as just and right.”12 But under new tile the floorboards of the marriage rotted. Discord introduced in Los Angeles, both the impersonal racial lacerations he suffered there and his diminishment by Jean’s employment, fed on Chester’s self-destructive behavior in New York, his drinking, his indiscriminate sex. Chester’s absolutism and self-doubt put him at double peril. This man called upon to withstand so much in life (never mind how much of it was of his own devising) finally could not withstand the failure of his novels, nor could his marriage.

  Curious that a man whose work at its best could float so free of prevailing wisdoms and become transgressive of genre and of ordinary categories of thought, could be at the same time in his life so rigid, everything black and white, adamantly right, starkly wrong. The central contradiction, perhaps, out of which all others spin? Absolutism dwells in Estelle’s stubborn avowals and hovers over Joseph’s shadowy passage; shrouds itself in Chester’s assumption that his position as breadwinner (with which Jean agrees, of course) is “just and right”; slouches up again in the all-or-nothing black-power sentiments of later years, which pushed him through multiple miscarried drafts of Plan B into silence.

  “I have been a Puritan all my life,” he wrote.13

  An absolutist, then. A man who carried within his deeper self some implicit template of what is right against which not only the hard fact of the world but his own actions and inactions must be measured always: a shield that shatters at its approach every charitable perception of the world, every action made in good faith, every intention. At the same time, in living contradiction, Himes as meliorist. He writes to, expects to, change the world. Yet he has little faith in mankind or its institutions. Like Voltaire at Ferney, his night is still filled with wrong, earthquakes, and executions. Things must change. Of course they must. But he will have that change, you understand, only on his terms.